Ivi and Giouli, third-year high school students, have been best friends forever. They share that tender friendship of early youth that is like love, overwhelming and defining you, and in which sometimes you risk getting lost – as you learn to see your reflection in the other. But what happens when something violently separates this slightly blurry form, these overlapping images?

Ivi is a modern fairy tale of transformation, a typical example of the genre, even though the forest changes to a school in the Athenian suburbs, and the battles are with the nationwide exams. It is a book that lovingly leans over our adolescent selves, our desires, loves, dreams – the tangled threads we must unravel to weave the fabric of our future life.

I feel like I am stretching to reach the other shore where the two of us, Giouli and I, stand, looking at each other indifferently, holding hands or sitting side by side on the local bus, our conjoined heads buried in the same music or wandering endlessly with a strawberry chocolate cone in hand, alone in the city in August.

I cry, but I do not cry for that shore that drifts away taking with it everything I held most dear. I am sure of that. I cry because Giorgos did not choose me.

Excerpt from the book