In July 2008, nineteen-year-old Fanis was on holiday in Paros with his friends, looking ahead to a promising career in professional football, with youthful brushes with delinquency seemingly his only obstacle. Then, in an instant, he was thrown from the back of a motorbike into a world where nothing could any longer be taken for granted.
What do you do when, instead of throwing punches in Exarchia and looking for drugs around Vathi Square, you suddenly have to learn how to use a board to transfer yourself into bed? What do you do when your family home has stairs? How do you manage to live independently when you are unskilled, unemployed, and addicted to gambling? And what happens to your relationships with the opposite sex?
Like the wheelchair, language becomes another vehicle that Fanis must learn to use in order to move forward. In this moving autobiography, he confronts the challenges of his new reality with humour, honesty and remarkable resilience. When it feels as though everything is coming down on you from every direction, the only thing left to do is keep your Kopf Hoch—your head held high.
2024 160. P
