Athens Prize for Literature 2008

Forty centuries after the biblical catastrophe at Sodom and Gomorrah, a rift forms in that very land on the shores of the Dead Sea and a mysterious violet salt gushes forth. Its appearance changes the geography of three continents and monopolizes market interest. The new substance does not serve but expects to be served. Its whims are oppressive. Its taste is addictive. Its silent influence is subjugating. The “Colony”, a modern-day Sodom, proves more cunning than its still biblical counterpart. A suffocating atmosphere surrounds its well-hidden secrets, and only one man can reveal them: the unsuspecting Phileas Book, who will be called upon, on a night unlike any other, to solve the most important crossword puzzle ever devised.

What Lot’s Wife Saw is a spectacular novel, a ceaseless intellectual puzzle, an unprecedented allegory about the fear, sin and guilt that lurk in the humid streets of a “coastal” Paris — as well as in the dark corridors of the human mind.

KASTANIOTIS, 2007, 486 P