Pellegrina
Christopher DeMorteau
COMING SOON
Christopher DeMorteau, author of Pellegrina, is the son of a mailwoman and a merchant navy mariner.
As a child, he met his father in ports across the world—Odessa, Aruba, Singapore—wherever the tanker came to dock.
Trained as a Light Infantry Scout, he went on to serve for two decades as an Army Legal Officer, with deployments in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and beyond.
After a brief period as an armed contractor,
he joined the International Committee of the
Red Cross, taking part in missions across Iraq, Nepal, Lebanon, Laos, West Africa, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.
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​His academic work—particularly on the law of civil wars—has been widely cited, including in the Revised Commentary to the Geneva Conventions.
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Today, he manages a law firm in Greece with a reach throughout Europe,
and lectures occasionally on Humanitarian Law, Operational Law, and the methodology of war crimes investigations.
He has published monographs and numerous scholarly articles under his real name, Constantine Mortopoulos.
Pellegrina is his first—and last—work of fiction.
Saints behaving badly, philosophers without noses waiting for thunder, three men you would not want to meet,
a single bullet in the heads of the father and the son,
and a woman who sees no reason to live —until she finds the one reason worth living for…
These are the protagonists of the fast, ancient–contemporary tragicomedia that knocks annoyingly at the doors of the motel where Shakespeare, Emperor Arcadius, Girolamo Bargagli, and a Hindu sage stopped for the night.
Full of suspense and alms for the seeker, this novel explores the quest for the one truth, on the pilgrimage we will all make sooner or later.
God and His will, our souls and our own.
The saxophone in Pellegrina always plays a melancholic tune after the last customer leaves.
