Tess Uriza Holthe
TESS URIZA HOLTHE is the author of the critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling When the Elephants Dance. She grew up on a Filipino-American family in San Francisco. When the Elephants Dance is inspired, in part, by the experiences of her father, who was a young boy in the Philippines during World War II.
Tess Uriza's second book, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes, was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2007 and an ALA Notable Book of 2007.
In a series of linked stories, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes takes readers onto the 5:45 train to Cannes, linking northern Italy with the French Riviera while running like a thread through lives that touch one another in unexpected and often secret ways: Chazz, the heir to a great fortune; GianCarlo, a kindhearted young Italian thief; Anais, who feels the insults of age; and Sophie, a talented young photographer. At the center we find beautiful, bereaved Claudette, wife of the doomed Chazz, making the journey to Cannes, where she, like all the others, remembers her past and draws from it irresolvable feelings of strength and fragility, meaning and emptiness, permanence and loss.
In these stories, Tess Uriza Holthe peers deeply into the inner lives of these women and men. Sad and lovely, often at the same time, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes takes us to places where we are happy to linger, in the world and in the human heart.
Author photo copyright: Ross Pelton
“When you start to say to yourself, just one look back, just one glance, the danger will have begun for you.”
“These women were like her sisters. Even if she wanted desperately to be free of them. Sometimes the strongest prisons were the ones created by the people you loved the most.”
“Two people can be in the same room and still be gone.”