Last Days in Plaka: A Novel

(Hardback)

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An immersive and multifaceted novelThe Talented Mr. Ripley by way of Elena Ferrantethat explores the lies at the heart of an old womans identity and the desperation of a young womans struggle to belong.

Today's Athens is a city of contradictions and complexityit is grand and scruffy, ancient and modern, full of strivers, refugees and old-timersand nowhere more so than the neighborhood of Plaka, where the Parthenon looms overhead and two women grapple with what is right and what is true, and how to live your life when you are running out of time.

Searching for connection to her parents heritage, Greek-American Anna works at an Athens gallery by day and makes street art by night. Irini is elderly and widowed, once well-to-do but now dependent on the charity of others. When the local priest brings the two women together, its not long before they form an unlikely bond. Annas friends cant understand why she spends so much time with the old woman, yet Anna becomes more and more consumed by Irinis tales of a glamorous past. As they join the priests tiny congregation to study the Book of Revelations in preparation for a pilgrimage to Patmos, Anna sinks deeper into Irinis stories of an estranged daughter and lost wealth and the earthquake damage to her noble home.

Looking for revelation of her own, and driven by a sense that time is running out, Anna makes a decision that puts her in peril, exposes Irini's web of lies, and compels Anna to confront the limits of her own forgiveness.

Reviews

Praise for Henriette Lazaridis

"At first, its the forbidding ice sheets of Antarctica, a 'place that offers beauty with a fist,'that dominate Henriette Lazaridiss ingenious new novel.When the two strands of the narrative unite and then combust, the 'terra nova'of the novels title turns out to be a 'new world'not of the land but of the mind." * New York Times Book Review *
"As if Jack London and Anita Shreve had a literary baby: an absolutely immersive story of Antarctic survival, suffrage, a love triangle, art, and betrayal. Engrossing from the first moment to the last page, when youll immediately return to the beginning to start again." * Jenna Blum,New York TimesNew York Times bestselling author ofWith *
"The novel's strength lies in its impressive marriage of art and exploration. Lazaridis relishes in long, gorgeous descriptions of scenes and explanations of shot-framing and darkroom photo processing as intimate as a love letter. This underlying stream of artistic enchantment hits the mark and keeps the pages turning." * Associated Press *

Author Bio

Henriette Lazaridisis the author ofThe Clover House,which was aBoston Globebestseller and Terra Nova, which is also available from Pegasus Books. Hershort work has appeared inELLE,The New York Times, Pangyrus, and more, and she has earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. She is agraduate of Middlebury College,Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Havingtaught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She foundedThe DrumLiterary Magazine and currently runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel, at henriettelazaridis.substack.com. For more, visit henriettelazaridis.com.