Archipelago: A Novel [Paperback]

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.
 A novel of turnings; its narrator knows how to pause and gaze at the horizon, without the need for naming what lies beyond her sight, this moment. ….Bakopoulos’s narrator [is] a woman on the verge of a horizon she can’t see, and happier for it —Chicago Review of Books

Lyric…. moving, meditative novel about language, identity and a search for self-understanding…. moves in waves of beautiful imagery and well-crafted sentences, and beckons the reader to linger. —Book Page

Beautiful novels are common, but elegant novels are rare, and Archipelago is elegant in its honesty, its quiet wisdom, and its undaunted reckoning with the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves.... a singlS0