The heroine, 82-year-old Evridiki Mattheou, is left completely alone, all her relatives having passed away. She is now about to move from her house to an old folks’ home called “The Fifth Season”.

Within twelve hours Evridiki has to decide what she’s going to leave behind. Twelve hours during which her entire life will unfold. Like a shadow, the history of Greece runs through and leaves its mark on Evridiki’s life.

Evridiki is suffering from dementia, but at the same time her mind and senses are charmingly alert. “I’m growing old, I remember, I yearn, I invent, I mend the holes in my memory, I discover. I am reborn.”

Evridiki struggles not to forget. She is able to “transform the world at will, to change the things that hurt her, to convert cold-hearted marble into warm flesh; blood into ink”.

A novel about the expectations and upsets of life, literal but also inner exile, old age, loneliness, memory, and all those things the mind constructs to help the soul and body survive.

Reading it makes the heart and mind richer.

Kastaniotis, 2017, 211 pages