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.
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 charge of endless possibility. Natalie Bakopoulos weaves a story of vulnerability, desire, and bittersweet truth, unraveling old ways of living and, in the end, creating something new.
Selected Reviews:
Praise for Scorpionfish
“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
"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 her 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 loses – portrayed in limpid, pensive prose reminiscent of Rachel Cusk – is deeply affecting.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes and The Welsh Girl
"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 is 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