The Green Shore

IN HER MASTERFUL DEBUT NOVEL, The Green Shore, award-winning writer Natalie Bakopoulos vividly illuminates a seminal yet little-explored moment in Greek history: the 1967 military coup d'etat, which ushered in a seven-year period of devastating brutality and repression.

Through lyrical prose of wisdom and sophistication, we follow the adventures of one family, whose stories of love and resistance play out against the backdrop of this turbulent period. Eleni, a widowed doctor, struggles with her lost sense of passion, both personal and political, in the face of this latest challenge to democracy. Her brother, Mihalis, an eccentric poet of some renown, finds himself keeping a low profile as he attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife. Elenis daughter Sophie, a student of French literature, gets swept up in the resistance alongside her privileged, left-leaning boyfriend, while her youngest child, pensive Anna, watches events unfold with increasing anxiety. As the years pass and the dictatorships oppressive rule continues unchallenged, their lives unfold in surprising ways, each seeking and finding love and fulfillment as they struggle to make their own peace with when to stay silent and when to act.

Set in Athens and Paris, The Green Shore is an ambitiously told and transporting literary tour de force that delves into a momentous episode in the history of a distant country. The stories of these unforgettable characters sear our hearts and make us understand not only this place, but also what it means to be human, in a new way.

"Bakopoulos debuts with a family drama and revolutionary romance set during the Greek military junta of 1967 — 1974. On the April night that the army stages its coup, 21-year-old Sophie is dancing at her leftist boyfriend Nick's Athens apartment when soldiers barge in and arrest suspected student dissidents. Refusing to break contact with Nick and his fellow activists or abandon the liberal political convictions inherited from her family, Sophie sinks dangerously deeper into antijunta resistance. Meanwhile, her widowed mother, Eleni, faces possible trouble at the hospital where she works when the junta forbids treating torture victims. Eleni's brother, a famous leftist poet who's fought oppression before, has to gauge his response more carefully, since his family is at risk and an opportunity arises to reconnect with his estranged wife. Meanwhile, Sophie's observant younger sister tries to understand the purpose of the struggle. Warm, engaging characters and a richly authentic Greek setting make for an engaging read with commercial appeal. And while some narrative threads are less taut than others, Bakopoulos's juxtaposition of a historic conflict with the joys and trials of motherhood, the heedlessness of youth, and the durability of family ties is poignant and effective. Agent: Amy Williams, McCormick & Williams. (June)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments." Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian

"The Green Shore is an engrossing novel about political oppression, played out on an intimate family scale. Bakopoulos charts the subtle, gnawing pressures of life under the Greek junta — the steady drip of daily coercion — with an exacting empathy. In particular, her depiction of love under tyranny — by turns hesitant, furtive and liberating — is as astute as it is moving." Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

"The slow descent of political oppression and its invasion of private life — both these subjects are treated with insight and deep feeling in Natalie Bakopoulos's ambitious novel. Her characters are 'on fire, exploding from the inside out,' and they all reveal themselves memorably under the terrible (and sometimes ordinary) political and private circumstances in which they find themselves." Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

"The family at the center of Natalie Bakopoulos's gripping debut novel exists at the crossroads where the personal meets the political, as they indulge their idiosyncrasies and develop their destinies during Greece's military dictatorship of the late 60s and early 70s. There's plenty of drama and catharsis, as befitting a Greek tragedy, but the book remains, at heart, a meditation on the constant pain of nostalgia for times and places we have lost, and an exploration of how we express love — of family, partner, and country — in times of oppression." Eleni N. Gage, author of Other Waters

"Natalie Bakopoulos, in her sharp debut novel...[explores] the ways oppression clarifies and complicates desire, either binding our emotional and political selves or snapping them in two." Mark Athitakis, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The Green Shore is an extremely compelling, deeply personal tale...this searing literary accomplishment renders clear a monumental episode in our world history through the very intimate portrait of one family." Jenni Herrick, Shepherd Express

Set in Athens and Paris, Natalie Bakopoulos's masterful debut paints a finely etched portrait of one family, whose heartbreaking stories of love and resistance play out against the backdrop of the late 1960s Greek military dictatorship.

In 1967, as most of the city slept, colonels in the Greek military swiftly engineered a coup d'État. We bear witness to this devastating event and its brutal aftermath through the stories of four memorable characters: Sophie, a student of French literature, who gets swept up in the resistance alongside her privileged, left-leaning boyfriend; her mother Eleni, a widowed doctor, who struggles with her lost sense of passion in the face of this latest challenge to democracy; Sophie's uncle Mihalis, an outspoken poet of some renown, who finds himself keeping a low profile as he tries to reconcile with his estranged wife; and Anna, Sophie's younger sister, who undergoes the remarkable transformation from fearful insomniac to betrayed lover to empowered student activist.

As the years pass, their lives take divergent paths, each searching for love and fulfillment as they struggle to make their own peace with when to stay silent and when to act.

 IN HER MASTERFUL DEBUT NOVEL, The Green Shore, award-winning writer NatalieBakopoulos vividly illuminates a seminal yet little-explored moment in Greek history: the 1967 military coup détat, which ushered in a seven-year period of devastating brutality and repression.

Through lyrical prose of wisdom and sophistication, we follow the adventures of one family, whose stories of love and resistance play out against the backdrop of this turbulent period. Eleni, a widowed doctor, struggles with her lost sense of passion, both personal and political, in the face of this latest challenge to democracy. Her brother, Mihalis, an eccentric poet of some renown, finds himself keeping a low profile as he attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife. Elenis daughter Sophie, a student of French literature, gets swept up in the resistance alongside her privileged, left-leaning boyfriend, while her youngest child, pensive Anna, watches events unfold with increasing anxiety. As the years pass and the dictatorships oppressive rule continues unchallenged, their lives unfold in surprising ways, each seeking and finding love and fulfillment as they struggle to make their own peace with when to stay silent and when to act.

Set in Athens and Paris, The Green Shore is an ambitiously told and transporting literary tour de force that delves into a momentous episode in the history of a distant country. The stories of these unforgettable characters sear our hearts and make us understand not only this place, but also what it means to be human, in a new way.

Natalie Bakopoulos holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, and Granta Online and has received an O. Henry Award, a Hopwood Award, and a Platsis Prize for Work in the Greek Legacy. She is a contributing editor for the online journal Fiction Writers Review (FictionWritersReview.com). Each summer she teaches creative writing at the Aegean Arts Circle in Andros, Greece. The Green Shore is her first novel.