In a village in Crete, Nikiforos Cherouvim is born, the product of a rape and an "adopted" child of a forced marriage. He is a brilliant child who loves his mother Syrmaliot and hates his "father."
With heavy baggage from his childhood, Nikiforos skyrockets and charts a brilliant trajectory, for many: he acquires degrees, builds connections, obtains positions, social status, wealth, and a family. In this fierce struggle for ascendance, he loses the most valuable thing: his soul.
His involvement in usury, auctions, and human trafficking elevates him to the pedestal of power, believing he has control over everything. However, when you lose control of your conscience, a reversal is inevitably on the horizon: a sudden event as definitive as death will bring the Furies into his life.
Everything around him collapses, and his guilt leads him to a transformation, all while he is unaware of what fate has in store for him. The stories of the people around him will go through their own cycles to live, suffer, learn, be destroyed, or find peace. They will all walk their own paths, each leaving their own footprints.
And somewhere there, at this turning point of life, after the bend, Nikiforos will encounter Helen on an unknown path, a woman who also carries heavy baggage from the past. One soul with borrowed clothes and the other with borrowed costumes and false medals come together to live and struggle together.
Through the story of the main character of Alkyoni Papadaki's new novel, the trajectory of Greece in recent years emerges, on the map of false prosperity, social hypocrisy, greed, lost values and consciences, rage, humiliation, despair, but also humanity, sharing, faith, and struggle, which always leave a crack of hope for better days.
A relevant ethnography, where the cast of fictional characters is an infallible selection of roles that are all absolutely real, undoubtedly recognizable, and dramatically familiar. Each leaves its imprint as a record to ultimately deduce that everything is well measured, calculated, until the inevitable turn of life or history makes everything a confrontation.
