Why I Killed My Best Friend

(Paperback)

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Description

A young girl named Maria is lifted from her beloved Africa and relocated to her native Greece. She struggles with the transition, hating everything about Athens: the food, the air, the school, her classmates and the language. Just as she resigns herself to misery, Anna arrives. Though Anna's refined, Parisian upbringing is the exact opposite of Maria's, the two girls instantly bond over their common foreignness, becoming inseparable in their relationship as each other's best friend, but also as each other's fiercest competition; with boys, talents and politics.

Reviews

"In Why I Killed My Best Friend, Michalopoulou employs yet again such masterful and deft shifts in narrative voice tense, chronology, and setting to capture the jagged edges of the novel's central relationship, of the women as a pair and as individuals."Music & Literature "For a book that's under 300 pages, Amanda Michalopoulou's novel packs a whole lot of the joys, pitfalls, and politics of friendship, as well as Greece and all its problems, into one book."Flavorwire "What typifies Michalopoulou's novels is their artful structure, the stories within stories . . . an intense, introspective, sometimes obsessive, female protagonist . . . and an unreliable narrative that is constantly being undercut, reworked, tilted at a different angle."Vivienne Nilan

Author Bio

Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of five novels, two short story collections, and a successful series of children's books. One of Greece's leading contemporary writers, Michalopoulou has won that country's highest literary awards, including the Revmata Prize and the Diavazo Award. Her story collection, I'd Like, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Karen Emmerich is a translator of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her recent translations include volumes by Yannis Ritsos, Margarita Karapanou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Miltos Sachtouris. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is on the faculty of the University of Oregon.