The Green Shore

by Natalie Bakopoulos

In her masterful debut novel, The Green Shore, award-winning writer Natalie Bakopoulos vividly illuminates a seminal yet little-explored moment in Greek history: the 1967 military coup d’état, which ushered in a seven-year period of devastating brutality and repression.

Through lyrical prose of wisdom and sophistication, we follow the adventures of one family, whose stories of love and resistance play out against the backdrop of this turbulent period. Eleni, a widowed doctor, struggles with her lost sense of passion, both personal and political, in the face of this latest challenge to democracy. Her brother, Mihalis, an eccentric poet of some renown, finds himself keeping a low profile as he attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife. Eleni’s daughter Sophie, a student of French literature, gets swept up in the resistance alongside her privileged, left-leaning boyfriend, while her youngest child, pensive Anna, watches events unfold with increasing anxiety. As the years pass and the dictatorship’s oppressive rule continues unchallenged, their lives unfold in surprising ways, each seeking and finding love and fulfillment as they struggle to make their own peace with when to stay silent and when to act.

Set in Athens and Paris, The Green Shore is an ambitiously told and transporting literary tour de force that delves into a momentous episode in the history of a distant country. The stories of these unforgettable characters sear our hearts and make us understand not only this place, but also what it means to be human, in a new way.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Greece, France, Family, Book Club, Government

353 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2012

Reviews

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was attracted to The Green Shore because it is set in Greece during the 1967 coup and I wanted to learn about this period. I'm not sure why I finished it. As the novel sputtered along, I kept reading out of inertia and the hope that it would get better. The author juggled the superficial stories of various family members, jumping from one to the other, not developing any of them. There was no plot or momentum. Even the occasional parts about political oppression felt generic and didn't leave me with a deeper insight of this period.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

In clicking through the reviews, I fear I’ve read an entirely different book, because I see so many five star reviews. Natalie Bakopoulos’ debut novel, The Green Shore, details the experiences in the life of one family during the turbulent military junta in Greece between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I wanted to like this book, because I am a lover of historical fiction and I was not familiar with this particular aspect in Greek history, so I was eager to learn more. However, this story just fell short on so many levels. First, I would have appreciated just a bit more background on the coup d’etat to help me place the actions in some better context. And second, it felt as if the story never really gets started. I just kept waiting for some key moment that just never materialized. Characters were not fully developed; the family had very little bond or connection with one another despite the turmoil all around them. This in turn meant I had difficulty engaging with the characters.

I was primarily disappointed in the female characters. The women in this story had so much potential as each in their own way seemed poised to act on behalf of their country and the dictators strengthening their hold on the people and government, but they remained motivated by the men in their lives rather than their own convictions and passions.

The author writes well, but the story and the characters were just not compelling enough.

[Cresta McGowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos is a historical fiction novel that follows the effects of the military coup d'etat in 1967. While not a well-known historical movement, or at least one I didn't have knowledge of, it devastated much of Greece (mostly Athens) for many years. A coup d'etat is the sudden, illegal takeover of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to depose the extant government and replace it with another body, civil or military. Bakopoulos's novel follows the lives of one family and how this movement shaped their future.

She paints a very vivid picture of Greece, far different from the one that springs forth in my mind from movies such as Mama Mia' or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Those deliver only romantic notions of this country with white washed buildings and beautiful seaside views. While these are still a part of the country, The Green Shore gives the reader a more intimate relationship with Greece, and by choices of the characters, Paris, France. The two countries are juxtaposed against one another to illuminate not only the struggles, but the triumphs of a turbulent political climate.

***Small plot spoilers***

Bakopoulous's family in the novel centers on the lives of four major characters, of which the reader loves and hates. Sophie, the first major character the reader connects with, is a strong willed activist in love with a very wealthy leftist boyfriend. This relationship fizzles when Sophie must suddenly flee the country and it is with her departure I feel we, as the reader, really get to know who she is without the plight and passions of Greece thrust upon her. Sophie is smart and strong, she knows her mind and her heart, and it is with grace and dignity that she reclaims the woman she should be in Paris. Her defect from the country is not selfish, in fact, it is to save those she loves. This breaks her mother's heart but about Sophie, Bakopoulos's writes, "She emerged from the womb with her hand out first. Christos [her father] had once joked that Sophie cut the cord, bathed herself, put on her shoes, and walked out of the hospital room, fully formed and bossing the nurses around." Her choices were almost predetermined and I fell immediately in love with Sophie's persona.

Eleni, Sophie's mother, is a widow struggling with the imprint of Sophie's idealist and revolutionary father thrust upon her daughter's internal drive. But she also see's her deceased husband's passion in Sophie, which makes her proud. She, herself, eventually becomes resistant to the invasion and uses the skills she possess to help. Eleni is afraid to be a part of another resistance and we see this in her actions, her choices. "At her feet she noticed discarded “No” ballots. At first, she assumed they had been cast by others like herself, people who wanted to vote their hearts but then became afraid. Then she considered something else. These “No” votes were probably bogus, planted there to dissuade those who entered brave and proud, to show them that yes, others had also thought like you, but see? They made the “right” decision after all." Through this I understood the challenges Eleni faced as a mother, what to do? Follow her heart, protect her home, make a safety net for her children? The turbulent forces of motherhood are alive and well deeply embedded with the turbulent forces of the world.

Eleni's brother, Mihalis, is a poet and former activist. This new push conjures up for him not only the hurt from the communist movement in the past, but stirs his desire to be a part of something great again, to take back Greece for the people.

This leaves Anna, the youngest daughter, whom I'm sorry to say, I couldn't stand. While she's touted as the young girl that finally reaches maturity and breaks the bonds of being the "baby" of the family, I found her whiney and misguided. Her choices stem not from a place of passion for her country like Sophie's, Eleni's, or even Mihalis', but from a selfish deep need to prove she is worthy.

However, I believe Bakopoulos's point of her novel was to help the reader understand the devastation of heavy-handed government and how it pushes people to the extremes of their inner demons; what people will do when they feel they have no other choice.

I found the novel to be moving in a deep and genuine way, and I found myself completely captured by the family involved, turning each page to find out if they were safe, alive, whole, loved. The power of Bakopoulos's writing is her ability to keep the reader's stamina in full force to the end. This was a book I did not want to put down. It wasn't that I just wanted to know what happened, I needed to know what happened.


This is Bakopoulos's first novel, complete at 368 pages, published by Simon and Schuster. While it is historical fiction, the prose is so elegant and full of wisdom, the history becomes the backdrop which propels the story to unfold. It does not, in anyway, feel like a textbook story of a military plight. This book questions many of our deepest philosophical questions, particularly the balance between public and private domains of ourselves, our families, our country. This book should go on the "read now" list. I stumbled upon it via a Writer's Digest article and I'm so glad I did.

For more about Natalie Bakopoulos visit her author page on the Simon and Schuster website: http://www.simonnovels.com/authors/na...

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to love this book. There are so many things about it that make it appealing to me. First, it's set in Greece, opening at a party in a neighborhood I lived in, with a character who teaches at the school I taught at. Second, it's set around an interesting historical event, the 1960s coup in Greece, that is not often written about, particularly in fiction. Third, it's told from multiple perspectives, which is a style I enjoy.

However, in the end, I merely liked it. I kept waiting to really get into the story, but it never happened. The storytelling felt superficial to me. We were always on the surface, never diving too deep into anything emotional. The conflict was muted and, more often than not, seemed to be resolved off the page, as though the author was protecting the characters and us from any real conflict. And at times I felt that the author's knowledge about Greece and its history (which was clearly strong) held the book back, as though the author were so worried about getting things right that she didn't let the novel find its own truth.

Despite being somewhat disappointed by this book, I could still tell that the author is a very talented writer, and I will give other work by her a chance.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gorgeous story takes place in Greece in the 1960s and 70s, and follows the members of a family over the course of a decade whose defining event is the 1967 coup when Greek's military "colonels" seized power. From the parents' generation, we meet Eleni, a widowed mother and Mihalis, her poet brother, who experiences political upheaval before during and after WWII. Sisters Anna and Sophie deal with the changes in Greece and in their family in different ways, but what makes this novel so compelling is how much the author makes you care about these characters, no matter how nobly or selfishly they behave. The sense of a world continuing to spin in the midst of almost unbearable change and uncertainly feels real and important. I loved this book.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was so dull. I could barely get through it. I really feel bad. How can a book about a coup and a student-led revolution, with lots of illicit sex, be so, well... not compelling.

[Susann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved learning more about this time and place, the 1967 military coup in Greece. But although I was pleased to have read the book, I thought the characters got a little lost in the middle of the story. Sophie started off strong and then faded. I didn't understand Anna's motivations behind her love interest, and Mihalis either needed his own book or needed to be pushed to the side. I would have welcomed much more of Eleni and Andreas.

Some of the language was overwrought and could have been trimmed. Just one example:
"The simple awareness of the dictators stealthily altered both public and private space, and every so often, it burst out like this: a frightening lump, a jagged edge, an eerie, alarming wail."

Other examples involve multiple paragraphs saying the same thing.

I would still recommend this to anyone wanting to know more about this period. The prologue and first chapter were unputdownable. The last few chapters were also page turners in their own way. Because even though I have my criticisms about the character development as a whole, each character did develop and I grew to care more and more about the entire family as the book progressed.

[Shelley Ettinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK but on balance a disappointment. The start promised a book about life under, and characters in struggle against, the fascist junta of the late 1960s-early 1970s in Greece, but sadly there was very very little compelling plunge-you-into-the-scene-&-the-feel writing on that topic. Everything is muted, at a remove. Even the (brief, scant) passages about arrests, imprisonment, torture have a muted, as-if, indirect unimmediacy to them. Basically a book about a middle-class family and the mostly tangential ways the junta years (barely) touch them. I want to read about workers and revolutionaries in the thick of the fight, not doctoral-dissertation-writing dilettantes sighing about it from faraway Paris.

I have close friends who were imprisoned and tortured in Pinochet's Chile, and others who were imprisoned during the Dirty War years in Argentina. I have heard some of their stories. There are Greeks with similar stories, raw, brutal, awful to hear. None of that is to be found in this novel.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book I won from Good Reads, my first one! It happens to be on topic that interests me; Greek stuff:) The author takes us back to the late sixties, early seventies in Greece, during the Junta government. Her characters are a family, a widow with her three children. The author does a great job with character development, I felt like I knew all of them pretty well by the end of the book. There is enough information for someone who is familiar with Athens to feel like they were there as well. The coming of age storyline for one of the characters turned me off a bit, without giving it away, adultery is not something I like to read about..

As a born Greek who has moved away from home I related somewhat to the two characters, Sophie in particular.

I wish there was even more historic content in this novel, the author could have given us more to fee upon..

I liked the book, it read well.

[DaveA · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel is putatively about the military coup in Greece in 1967 and of the torture of the civilians in the resistance. By the end of the book, I realized that there were only about 3 pates (out of 348) that said anything about the coup or the political issues, and there was less than 10 pages about torture. Of those pages, nothing was told in a compelling manner. This story isn't even about life in Greece, as after reading it, I did not get the feeling as though I had even an inkling about life in Greece. This story is really more about the romantic circumstances in one family. Even that is not portrayed in a manner that gave me much empathy for any of the characters.

I was ready to give the book three stars, since it more or less held my interest, until I reached the end. The story did not end, but simply stopped. There was no resolution of a single one of the story lines. I felt cheated.

[Селина Йонкова · Rating 3 out of 5]

забавно е, какви нямащи отношение към сюжета мисли ми минаваха, когато четох този роман.
от тази, че гърция( е не точно, гъция, а византия, ама карай!) започва с император константин и завършва с константин, първи и втори! 😉
или, че по същото време, на военната хунта, в “свободната” ми татковина, една вдовица, макар и лекар, едва ли, можеше да изгледа три големи деца, та и брат си, на когото едва ли, щяха да оставят да си стихоплетства, волно и против властта, да не споменавам, как “щяха” да пуснат синът да учи в сащ, а неемигрилата щерка в който и да е роден вуз.
всъщност дори само заради нелегално измъкнала та се голяма дъщеря, майката и останалите, сигурно нямаше и да бъдат оставени в столицата...
или пък съпоставката с думите на лорънс даръл, от сериала, който гледам, че “англичаните живеят в миналото, гърците в сегашното, а французите във франция” и разсъжденията на почти всеки от героите на романа, колко надълбоко са в историята си гърците. 😉

[Nicolette · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I loved this book, I felt that the storyline was not so much how the characters lived during oppression but how they resigned themselves.

One character lived in Paris and the other in the U.S. While I understood to some degree why they were both where they were, their migrations didn't add to the premise of what the book was supposed to be about. The character (the youngest sibling) who was the most revolutionary, was entrenched in some tragic love story that hid the strength and story of that character. The end of her story was horribly truncated; made me feel as if I was waiting for the end after I was done with this book. The mother's story that could have really been interesting was downplayed in a way that diminished rather than enhanced the overall premise.

Despite my feelings towards this book, I wanted to get to the end and I did so without it being painful.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was old enough in 1967; I should have known what was going on in the world. But a military coup in Greece wasn't on my radar, and even if it had been, I don't think I would have been able to really understand how the world could change so dramatically from one day to the next. This book allowed me to see the effects of this change on one family. Fearing the knock on the door, the stranger walking down the street, the family member who's suddenly unaccounted for. As life goes on - superficially most things remain the same. Students still attend school. Doctors still treat patients. A poet wants to be the voice of freedom. Summer vacations to neighboring islands. But, under the surface, life has changed and will never be the same again.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not very good. Lifeless: either generalisations ("Anna would sit and think....") or we arrive just after the (very) little whatever has just happened ("Meanwhile Michelis had been writing...") and all these women, sitting around thinking about boys in identically pathetic ways (because they are mother and daughters?) and, worst crime of all, none of it means any more than is flatly and boringly on the page. And I think parts of the story are told in the wrong order, which just sucks the marrow out of it, as does the complete avoidance of - mild spoiler - anything really bad happening to anyone. Timid, that's what it is.

If you can recommend any other novel set in Greece in this time (the Junta in 1967-74), please do.

[Elena Nicolaou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ultimately I’m happy to have waited to read The Green Shore. The novel came into my life at just the right time. The relevant time. It’s a book about people living through massive political upheaval—emphasis on the living. With guilt and with anguish, they kept living. Because the toppling only affects people at certain points. The rest of us keep living.

It’s something I’ve thought about constantly the last four years. The pandemic is arguably the first time that we’ve all been affected by the Trump presidency at once. But others have been affected. It was easy, as we were living, to forget about them.

The characters in The Green Shore are Greek, so they don’t live quite as restfully as we comfortable Americans. They’re always fighting against the power; being sent to island prisons or locking themselves in universities. Protest is more a part of daily life and ethos in Greece; I admire it. In fact, I think the characters in this book would be on the streets now, as I write this, demanding that Nevada hurries up. Or at least Sophie would be—before she left for Paris.

The book follows a politically active family dealing with the decade-long military junta. The mother, Eleni, is a doctor. Her eldest, Sophie, has to leave Greece after following in her political poet uncle’s footsteps and protesting vehemently. Her son scurries goes off to America at the first opportunity (and I hate to say it, definitely becomes someone who loves the Orange One). Her youngest, Anna, had a journey that I was particularly transfixed by—she morphs from a quiet girl to a firebrand, and I bought it.

Reading the historical events had me Googling through the entire book. One of the details struck me. I knew that Greek islands were used as prisons for political prisoners, but actually reading of the reality of those islands was striking. The Greek islands retain a reputation of being a vacation bliss, with the intellectual aura as old as the Odyssey. It’s the seat of the good life, the place where the Mediterranean diet gives people unusually long life expectancies (hey there, Ikaria).

Read the rest of my review here: https://booksandelena.com/2020/11/05/...

[Toula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a review of this book that begins with the words ...." I really wanted to love this book, but...." Wow, they took the words right out of my mouth ! I only liked this book.The problem with this book was that one never seems to get close enough to the characters. The writing is a bit wooden and the characters never seem to come alive.

I loved in Athens during this exact same period as the story in the book. I was a junior in high school ( in Halandri) and the day that the colonels took over the country we were sent home mid-day. As the school buses drove us the the streets of Athens , we looked out the windows and saw only military tanks rumbling down the wide boulevards. We spent 2-3 days in our apartment (curfew) and had our ears glued to the radio trying to figure out what was going on. We lived in Greece till the end of the school year and returned to Portland, Oregon. Ironically, we returned to Greece in 1974 when the junta fell, but that is another story.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was good but I felt like the book never went anywhere. The plot seemed non existent and the time lapses only added confusion. What started out as a book focused on characters fighting against a revolution became more about them settling into a dictatorship. The characters who were the most antagonistic in the beginning seemed resigned to life by the end of the novel. Where as the characters who were timid were more prone to acts of nonviolent resistance. The over all message to get from this book is that even though a dictatorship might change the political culture of a country, daily life must still go on.

[Despina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A period in Greek history that I am interested in reading more about. I am glad Ms Bakopoulos chose to write about it, although I would have appreciated more of the actual history and less about the familial relationships of her characters.

[Holly Weiss · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pre-publication review BOMC

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first heard of this book, I wanted to read it right away. But time went by, and forgot about it. Then I came across it at my local library and decided to check it out. I was attracted to it from the beginning because I lived through the coup d’état in Greece. I was a young child and remember it very well. The curfew, the tanks patrolling the streets, the no more than 5 people in one household (luckily there were 5 members in my family including myself, so we couldn’t invite anyone else). I wanted to read it, so that I can remember the little things that over the years have escaped my mind. Unfortunately, I found none of the things that I expected in the book. How the coup took place, who were the politicians, when the king abdicated, when democracy reigned again in Greece in 1974.

The book takes the reader from April 1967 when the regime of the colonels took over, to December 1973, but it never mentions when the king abdicated, or when in April of 1973 the Colonels were overthrown and another group of Colonels took over till July 1974 when finally democracy reigned over Greece. These were the facts that I wanted to read about in this book. Instead the book focuses on a family during the Junta living their lives in Athens Greece. In one specific part in the book, it refers as to the Athenians going on with their lives as if nothing happened, the day after the coup happened. That is not the case. I remember we had to stay inside for a few days, and had a curfew of 7:00pm. No one was allowed to be outside past that hour.

The book takes Eleni, doctor by profession and a widow, her three children, Taki, Sophie and Anna. Taki leaves Greece and moves to Michigan and doesn’t come back to visit till 1973 with his new wife and daughter. Sophie also leaves Greece with a false passport and goes to Paris to further her studies and she also doesn’t go back till 1973 when she is pregnant out of wedlock. Anna, the youngest, stays behind with her mother and has an affair with Evan who is a close friend of her uncle Mihalis, Eleni’s brother.

The book intertwines between the characters but never with much substance. The characters are empty. You cannot connect to any of them or even feel sorry for them. Eleni’s character could have been developed a lot more with the clinic she was running helping those who were tortured by the junta. Mihalis’s character is also quite empty, with his ideology of a poet, getting caught and thrown in jail. As for Sophie living in Paris, and coming home when she is pregnant, doesn’t say much of her character as it doesn’t show that she kept that much in touch with her mother or either her brother in Michigan or her younger sister Anna. Anna on the other hand is angry that both her siblings left and she doesn’t want to forgive them. Instead she is having an affair with Evan, who is her uncle Mihalis close friend and he is also married. That didn’t make sense at all to me.

Overall the characters were not quite developed. And in my opinion there were too many characters in the story which made it more difficult to identify or even connect with any of them. The book had a great beginning – the first 10 pages - and a great ending, the last 50 pages - but nothing in between.

I give this a book the rating of 3 starts out of 5. Only because I give the author credit on all the work she had to put into this book.

[Lynn Horton · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an interesting book.

As a small child in the sixties, I was vaguely aware of the social and political chaos in Greece. I haven't read much about the country (except in Literature or Classics classes, where everything began with Homer). When I found The Green Shore at my local bookstore, I decided a contemporary Greek novel would be a good addition to my reading list. (I've traveled to Greece a couple of times, and will return next fall, so was easily able to create the mental image for the novel's setting.)

This novel is particularly interesting in light of the Greek position — a precarious one — in the EU.The lethargy of the country, the Mediterranean pace of the place, the overwhelming sense of an illustrious past and limited future — these elements that represent Greece in my mind converge in The Green Shore. The novel follows an extended family from 1967 onwards. Two generations of revolutionaries, a widowed mother, a couple of characters coming of age, and a general lack of godliness are ingredients for a simmering story set against the uncertainty, defiance, and danger of a coup. It's not an overtly bloody or gory read, and elements that could easily become offensive are handled carefully.

That being written, this is not always an easy read, and it's not a book you want to pick up if you're looking for a pleasant distraction. But it's a GOOD book and fills the blanks about a time in a country about which most Americans know little.

Highly recommended.

[H L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because I knew nothing about this Greek coup, it was all very interesting. Bakopoulos Focuses on just one family to tell the story, which helps quite a bit. I wanted to like each of the characters, but ended up only liking the mother, Eleni.

Eleni’s husband died many years earlier of a brain aneurysm. She is a doctor, and eventually helps take care of those wounded by the dictators. She runs an illegal clinic.

Eleni’s brother Mihalis is a poet who was imprisoned by a previous regime, and is eventually imprisoned by the colonels who affected the coup. But the new regime means his wife, Irini, has been fired from her university job, so they are reunited.

Sophie is the oldest daughter, and at 17 when the coup happens, is involved in resistance. She must eventually run to Paris to avoid jail time and torture. There she meets her ex boyfriends cousin, Luukas, falls in love with him, and eventually gets pregnant, so they return to Greece, even though the Colonels are not out of power.

Taki, the only son, leaves soon after the coup to attend college in Michigan. He needs an American woman and marries there, without any intention of returning to Greece and his family. The novel ends with his visit a few months before the regime ends.

Anna is the youngest, a preteen in the beginning, but by the end she is in college and part of a resistant movement, that leaves her beaten and nearly dead. Her affair with a married man, both bored and annoyed me.

[Judith Squires · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to thank my daughter Jennifer for sharing this book with me. Many of us have forgotten about the Greek military coup of the 1960's--maybe we Americans were too distracted by our own increasing involvement in Vietnam, but this novel tells of a Greek family caught up in the turmoil in Athens and how it affects their lives. The mother, Eleni, is physician and widow, who has to raise her three children after her husband's sudden death. Her brother is a poet and leftist--always spoiling for an argument. The children are the independent oldest daughter, Sophie, who flees to Paris after a boyfriend has a close call with the military regime, Taki, the son who goes to America for college, leaving the turmoil of Greece behind, and the youngest, Anna, who stays in Athens and gets caught up in the student resistance. Eleni, the mother, becomes involved in providing medicare for those tortured by the brutal military rulers. I very much enjoyed this novel. My oldest grandson was born in Greece, my daughter lived there for a number of years and I was lucky enough to visit her. Somehow the Greeks always endure throughout even the more dire circumstances.

[Laraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 1/2 - 4 stars. This was a tough book to get into for me, initially but I perservered and managed to start feeling connected to the people in the book. Set in Athens, Greece at the time of the brutal 1967 military coup, it shows us a family and how everyone is affected by the political situation in different ways, some more permanently than others. Eleni is a widow raising her three children, Sophie, Taki and Anna. Each of them finds their own way to deal with the political reality around them. Taki goes to the US to go to school and never really comes home again. Sophie, involved in the student protests, flees to Paris and starts a new life there. And Anna, too young to participate at the time, finds her own way of dealing with life under a military junta. Although I am not a fan of political novels, I became interested in how each person changed due to their circumstances. A good, but slow read.

[Johanna Markson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Green Shore, Natalie Bakopoulos
A terrific read and an impressive first novel. The Green Shore tells the story of a family dealing with life during and after the 1967 military coup in Greece. The novel chronicles the way certain members of the family survive the invasive, oppressive, and frightening military dictatorship that lasts for far too many years. Each in their own quiet and not so quiet way defy the dictators, if only by leaving Greece. The story unfolds leisurely, like a summer day in Greece, and totally fits the tale being told. Each of the main characters captivates, and their small and large rebellions teach you so much about who they are. I really enjoyed this and was glad to learn about a piece of history I knew absolutely nothing about

[JQ · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up on this one because it was frankly just so boring. Nothing much ever happened, which considering what was going on politically at the time was surprising, and disappointing! Maybe there were too many characters/points of view or something; the author should have perhaps focused on just one or two people's experiences of this living through coup and how it affected them. I could never care about any of them or what they were doing or might do; they were all pretty much interchangeable after a while. Just very, very blah.

[sam p · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book! But my bias is that I’m really interested in the Greek civil war + junta due to ancestry and leftist interest. In an age where our dopamine receptors are completely shot, propaganda is insidious, and leftist history continues to be silenced- I think historical fiction is a gorgeous remedy. This book kept me interested by intertwining numerous stories, and highlights such important human realities of the torture and repression of Greek leftists during this time. I need this to be made into a movie and I must be in that writing room please

[Jaime Boler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this as part of a First Reads giveaway. Here is my review:

It Just Runs in the Family

The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos (Simon & Schuster; 368 pages; $25).


Good writing must run in the Bakopoulos family. Brother and sister, Dean and Natalie Bakopoulos have written three books between them. Dean is the author of Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (2004) and My American Unhappiness (2011). This year, Natalie joins her brother with the release of her lush and picturesque debut The Green Shore. They are the children of immigrants; their mother is Ukrainian and their father is Greek. In a nod to her father's birthplace, Natalie sets her story mostly in Greece and focuses on a dark period of the country's history, one that is virtually unknown to most: the 1967 to 1974 military dictatorship.

This period in Greek history, quite honestly, was Greek to this reviewer. Natalie Bakopoulos, though, takes this event and personalizes it. In her novel, the political becomes personal, and the personal becomes political.

Bakopoulos does this by introducing readers to one Greek family and telling the story from multiple perspectives: Eleni, the matriarch and doctor with a passion for healing; her brother Mihalis, a poet who was once in exile; her daughter Sophie, a rebel at heart who flees Greece for Paris; and younger daughter Anna, a reluctant revolutionary but perhaps the fiercest of them all. Revolution and resistance seem to be part of this family's DNA sequence. They all resist the military junta, yet each finds unique ways to oppose the colonels. This family truly drives Bakopoulos's story as we see what revolution will do to a country, a city, a community, and a family.

Since Bakopoulos is part Greek, she is intimately aware of Greek history and tradition. Her knowledge and familiarity with Greece make this story all the more authentic. Early on in the novel, Eleni and the rest of the family celebrate Easter. Each takes a dyed-red egg. Bakopoulos writes, "As was tradition, they would each take a hard-boiled, bright red egg and hit it together with the adjacent person's, first the pointed end and then the round. The last one with an intact egg was destined to have good fortune for the rest of the year." Reading this description, I could not help but wonder if the family itself would be cracked and broken by novel's end. Bakopoulos's use of this Greek tradition is clever foreshadowing.

Although the family is intact by the end of the book, the dictatorship has altered each of them. Eleni decides to help those people who have been tortured and abused by the government. She, along with an intriguing man she meets, opens up a free clinic in secret. This is Eleni's way of resisting the junta. Mihalis, meanwhile, continues to write and speak out against the colonels. He, more than the others, is on the military's radar since he is an artist and former exile. His vitriol, not surprisingly, gets him into trouble once again. It is Mihalis's spirit that Sophie has inherited. She and her boyfriend, Nick, get caught up in the early days of the revolution. The colonels take Nick prisoner and Sophie flees to Paris.

The Paris setting allows Bakopoulos to explore another locale, but the heart of this novel lies in Greece, not in France. And it shows in the writing. As far as this novel goes, Paris cannot hold a candle to Athens.

Sophie may be away from the dictatorship, but the revolution is still a part of her quotidian existence. It is through Sophie's absence from Greece that Bakopoulos is able to focus on how a person can be homesick not only for a family but for a country, even for a nation in political turmoil. Bakopoulos shows Sophie's deep longing for home, a sentiment that only grows as the years go by.

Perhaps Sophie is less of a revolutionary in Paris, but only because she is not directly involved in the resistance. Sophie, though, soon becomes a revolutionary in other, more personal and unexpected ways when she is pregnant and happily unwed. The traditional Eleni must come to terms with her daughter's newfound independence.

With Sophie's departure from home, the younger Anna feels lonely. She turns to her older married lover for comfort, but their relationship is doomed to fail, as all such associations are. Anna is brooding and moody much of the time. The decision to rebel comes too abruptly in her case. It is almost as if she thinks protesting the junta is the ultimate way to stick it to everyone in her life. I felt Bakoupoulos should have provided more allusions to Anna's ultimate path. However, in some cases, it is only one event or even one split second that prompts a person to resist. But it feels wrong for Anna. Her resistance almost gets her killed.

When The Green Shore ends, the military is still in power, although the last days of the junta are near. Bakopoulos shows us that, regardless of revolution, life still goes on. Lovers marry. Women give birth. Children grow. The elderly die. These are a fact of life and do not change based on political leanings or whims.

Natalie is the new Bakopoulos to watch. Good writing or a rebellious spirit—sometimes it just runs in the family.

The Green Shore comes out June 5. Bakopoulos will sign copies of her novel and do a reading from the book at Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 27, 2012.

The version I read was an Advance Reader's Edition.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll admit it, the title comes from a translation I did of a wonderful poem by Kostas Karyotakis. That's all I contributed here -- and I'd like to think my enthusiasm for the book was not predetermined. But who can know these things. I remember these characters, and I remember how they managed to make it through those awful years in Greece. Below is a thing I wrote 7 years ago:

https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Scorpionfish so much that I wanted to read more from her-- this one wasn't quite as captivating, but still a great book. I wanted to know more about Eleni and less about her children. My selfishness aside, it's worth a read.