By some blessed coincidence, Aria and Orianthi meet in the summer of 1963. However, a fateful event halts their budding friendship prematurely and the two girls get lost in the trials that life has in store for them. Each one is carried away by a private whirlwind of events. Orianthi traumatically, Aria less painfully. After many years, fate brings them together again to tell their stories and they realize that everything they experienced seemed as though it happened to someone else, as if an invisible, scheming puppeteer was pulling the strings of their existence. From the 1960s onward, from the Athenian and Canadian anti-dictatorial struggle to Lebanon’s bloody civil war, the novel leaps between destruction and re-creation, past and present, East and West. It’s a book about the generations to come, about the wounds of small nations, about the right to be human in your own country.

Kastaniotis, 2019, 520 p.