Published in 2025
236 pages
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of Scorpionfish and The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, MQR, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She’s an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book reviews have regularly appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and she’s a contributing editor to Fiction Writers Review. She’s on the faculty of Writing Workshops in Greece.
What is this book about?
Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago is a striking, haunting novel that offers meditations on the slippery borders of nations, languages, middle age, and the self.
Along the way to a translation writing residency on the Dalmatian coast, Archipelago’s unnamed narrator has an unsettling, aggressive encounter with a man on a ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend who seems to have included a version of her in his novel. They strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her translation work.
The hazy summer stretches on until, after a sudden shift, she embarks upon an impulsive road trip back to Greece, crossing borders. Spare and lyrical, with subversions of the Odyssey and its singular Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator’s family house—not simply back to a self and home, but beyond it.
