READERS ARE CALLING IT THE BOOK OF THE YEAR
'I haven't cried over a novel in years. Tutto passa, but this book stays.' *****
From the yellow bougainvillea of the Aegean islands to the concrete heart of Athens, from the jasmine-scented nights of Roma to the Sheffield mizzle, Marina's life becomes an archive of departures and returns. She is a psychologist who listens to the sorrows of the world. She is a refugee who learns that home is not a place but a table. She is eighty-one years old, watching drones replace streetlights, and she still has the bottle of Henderson's whiskey in her kitchen.
In an apartment in Athens, a scarred wooden table holds more than meals. It holds the weight of survival. Around it gather: Malik, a Syrian surgeon who lost everything; Callum, a Scottish writer who came to Athens to write about crisis and stayed because he fell in love; Efe, a Nigerian survivor learning to stitch a new life; Stella, a Cretan widow who treats every meal like a political act of defiance; and Victor, a one-eyed cat who doesn't care about class or "decent jobs," as long as the hand that strokes him is real.
They are strangers who become family. They are the geometry of staying in a world obsessed with leaving.
"Tutto passa," they say. Everything passes.
But Marina spent eighty-one years learning the truth: it's not a consolation. It's a threat. And it's the only thing that makes us free.
A STUNNING, SWEEPING STORY OF CONNECTION, RESILIENCE, AND THE UNBREAKABLE BONDS THAT GUIDE AND SHAPE US
This is a novel about: