Scorpionfish

By: Natalie Bakopoulos

Narrated by: Hillary Huber, Malcolm Hillgartner

A Best Summer Read at The Daily Beast and Alma

A captivating and transporting travel novel, Scorpionfish reveals how what we leave behind may be exactly what we've been looking for all along.

After the unexpected deaths of her parents, academic Mira returns to her childhood home in Athens. On her first night back, she encounters a new neighbor, a longtime ship captain who has found himself, for the first time in years, no longer at sea. As one summer night tumbles into another, Mira and the Captain’s voices drift across the balconies of their apartments, disclosing details and stories: of careers, of families, of love.

For Mira, love has so often meant Aris, an ex-boyfriend and rising Greek politician who has recently become engaged to a movie star. There is, too, her love for her dear friend Nefeli - a well-known artist who came of age during the military dictatorship - as well as Dimitra and Fady, a couple caring for a young refugee boy. Undergirding each relationship is the love that these characters have for Athens, a beautiful but complicated city that is equal parts lushness and sharp edges.

Scorpionfish is a map of how and where we find our true selves: in the pull of the sea; the sway of late-night bar music; the risk and promise of art; and in the sparkling, electric, summertime charge of endless possibility. Award-winning author Natalie Bakopoulos braids a story of vulnerability, desire, and bittersweet truth, unraveling old ways of living and, in the end, creating something new.

©2020 Natalie Bakopoulos. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"Hillary Huber and Malcolm Hillgartner deliver finely calibrated performances of this evocative novel about desire, loss, and identity.… Hillgartner, whose enticing voice is elegant and rough, offers a thoughtful performance of a man struggling with duty versus desire. Huber's Mira is a sympathetic mix of yearning, perplexity, and fortitude. Together they weave a beguiling tale."
—AudioFile Magazine

"Skillfully captures the characters’ sense of feeling stuck between stations. This riff on the adage that you can never go home poses essential questions on what it means to belong."
—Publishers Weekly

"Richly told. . . . A remarkable recognition of how language can work, how grief and love and loss can be so particular, so meaningful, so universal―and how words can make those resonances propulsive and haunting.” —BookPage, Starred Review