SCORPIONFISH
After the unexpected deaths of her parents, young academic Mira returns to her childhood home in Athens. On her first night back, she encounters a new neighbor, a longtime ship captain who has found himself, for the first time in years, no longer at sea. As one summer night tumbles into another, Mira and the Captain’s voices drift across the balconies of their apartments, disclosing details and stories: of careers, of families, of love.
For Mira, love has so often meant Aris, an ex-boyfriend and rising Greek politician who has recently become engaged to a movie star. There is,
After the unexpected deaths of her parents, young academic Mira returns to her childhood home in Athens. On her first night back, she encounters a new neighbor, a longtime ship captain who has found himself, for the first time in years, no longer at sea. As one summer night tumbles into another, Mira and the Captain’s voices drift across the balconies of their apartments, disclosing details and stories: of careers, of families, of love.
For Mira, love has so often meant Aris, an ex-boyfriend and rising Greek politician who has recently become engaged to a movie star. There is, too, her love for her dear friend Nefeli—a well-known queer artist who came of age during the military dictatorship—as well as Dimitra and Fady, a couple caring for a young refugee boy. Undergirding each relationship is the love that these characters have for Athens, a beautiful but complicated city that is equal parts lushness and sharp edges.
Scorpionfish is a map of how and where we find our true selves: in the pull of the sea; the sway of late-night bar music; the risk and promise of art; and in the sparkling, electric, summertime charge of endless possibility. Award-winning author Natalie Bakopoulos weaves a story of vulnerability, desire, and bittersweet truth, unraveling old ways of living and, in the end, creating something new.
- Tin House
- Paperback
- July 2020
- 256 Pages
- 9781947793750
Buy the Book
$16.95
About Natalie Bakopoulos
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and her work has appeared in Tin House, the Iowa Review, the New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She’s an assistant professor of creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit and a faculty member of the summer program Writing Workshops in Greece. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Praise
“Skillfully captures the characters’ sense of feeling stuck between stations. This riff on the adage that you can never go home poses essential questions on what it means to belong.”—Publishers Weekly
“Filled with nostalgia and a simmering grace.” —The Daily Beast
“A novel where you can practically taste summer on its pages. . . . a magnetic story.” —Alma
“A riveting, elegant novel keenly observed in the manner of Elena Ferrante and Rachel Cusk. A divine, chiseled stunner.” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus
“What a gorgeous weave this novel is——somehow, with the lightest and most precise of touches, Bakopoulos reveals how lives, families, and countries fall together and apart in this thing we call life. In this one summer in Athens, love and death and art and politics all shimmer and quake, lifting and breaking the heart in equal measure.” —Stacey D’Erasmo, author of Wonderland
“Bakopoulos writes of expatriates and exiles, immigrants and refugees, with such intimacy, tenderness, and wisdom, intuiting as she does that these are all states of grief. The stoicism with which her characters bear their various losses——portrayed in limpid, pensive prose reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s work——is deeply affecting.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes
“Scorpionfish is transporting, a finely tuned story about art and friendship and the weight of history. Against the backdrop of the Greek economic crisis, Natalie Bakopoulos depicts Athens and island life with grace and accuracy, telling a story of return at once deeply personal and universal. A moving novel with an unexpected undertow.” —Cara Hoffman, author of Running
“Scorpionfish dazzles, fierce and tender in turn. The clarity of its insights about love and loss and grief will break you and remake you. Savor it, and it will leave you changed.” —Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing
“Haunting and precise. I loved it.” —Courtney Maum, author of Costalegre