Archipelago: A Novel

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...