Archipelago

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.