Archipelago

by Natalie Bakopoulos

Overview

Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago is a striking, haunting novel that offers meditations on the slippery borders of nations, languages, middle age, and the self.

Along the way to a translation writing residency on the Dalmatian coast, Archipelago’s unnamed narrator has an unsettling, aggressive encounter with a man on a ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend who seems to have included a version of her in his novel. They strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her translation work.

The hazy summer stretches on until, after a sudden shift, she embarks upon an impulsive road trip back to Greece, crossing borders. Spare and lyrical, with subversions of the Odyssey and its singular Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator’s family house—not simply back to a self and home, but beyond it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781963108309
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of Scorpionfish and The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, MQR, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She’s an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book reviews have regularly appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and she's a contributing editor to Fiction Writers Review. She’s on the faculty of Writing Workshops in Greece.

Editorial Reviews

"Archipelago is a gorgeous, haunting novel about translation, narrative, and the slippage between selves: who we are and who others believe us to be. We follow our narrator-traveler on her dreamlike journey, from one achingly beautiful setting to another, from one memory to another, tantalized and unsettled by her every encounter. With this novel Bakopoulos weaves a spell and a mystery and makes something wholly her own."

Lydia Kiesling

2025-05-30
Bakopoulos’ third novel finds an American translator participating in a residency program on a Croatian island.

“I attribute all that summer’s disquiet to an encounter with a man on the ferry, an encounter that was as destabilizing as it was strange.” So begins this novel narrated by an unnamed middle-aged translator who was raised in suburban Detroit but has been living in Greece for several years. The ferry ride is one leg of her journey to “a Croatian island off the Dalmatian coast,” where she is to attend a two-week translators’ residency at an international arts center. While she’s walking around the island, a man she hasn’t seen in years spots her, and as they chat, he repeatedly calls her by the wrong name. The narrator plays along (“I marveled at how natural it felt to be this woman, to answer to this name”), and the two embark on a casual romance. After the residency ends, the narrator rents a studio near the translators’ center and continues her romance with the man; their overnight stay with his wealthy friend carries a hint at drama to come (“This is going to be a very strange weekend, I said, isn’t it”), but it never does. Likewise, toward the book’s midpoint, something odd occurs, after which nothing of corresponding consequence happens. The narrator’s invitingly confiding tone, lovely descriptions of her surroundings, and thoughtful reflections on translation, swimming, aging, borders, and male menace can do only so much to offset the narrative’s lack of story. The “disquiet” promised by the novel’s opener turns out to be nothing more than the everyday surprises and irritants of life, albeit in a dazzling setting. For some readers this may be enough.

More of a travelogue interspersed with story than the other way around.

Kirkus Reviews