• Good Will Come From the Sea
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Archipelago Books

Good Will Come From the Sea

Good Will Come From the Sea

by Christos Ikonomou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

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Christos Ikonomou’s collection Good Will Come From the Sea is a dirge for the Greek economic crisis and the devastation it has wrought, a profound meditation on the nature of justice in an unjust world. On an unnamed island, struggling migrants and trapped locals endure the crushing weight of poverty in these four linked stories.

Artemis and Stavros see their dreams destroyed when a local cartel burns down their restaurant; wheelchair-bound Chronis agonizes as a neighbor assaults a young girl. Meanwhile, Lazarus wanders the island in search of his lost son, “disappeared” at the hands of the local mob – the same gangsters who break visionary Tasos’s body and spirit for daring to stand up to them.

As the characters mourn their livelihoods, loved ones, and dreams, only ghostly threads of hope keep them marching toward a future that shows little promise of change. Good Will Come From the Sea is a tender and defiant song of loss, a study of poverty’s toll on the human soul.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810212
Pages: 250
Publication Date:

Praise

The first story, "I’ll Swallow Your Dreams,” from Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come From the Sea—a dystopian collection about Greece’s economic devastation—blew my head off with its tender and awful brutality.
—Maggie Nelson, The New York Times

About halfway through Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea, as the titular story wound to an end, I realized I hadn’t been breathing. My eyes were trained on the text, moving determinedly down the page, but my breath had caught somewhere between my lungs and the roof of my mouth...Karen Emmerich’s faultless translation is populated by people fighting to maintain their livelihoods and dignity under circumstances beyond their small, human control. To say this is a book about the crisis would be too limiting. Rather, it is a book about people staring foggily into a future difficult to discern while trying to navigate an unmarked present.
—Julia Sanches, Three Percent

(Ikonomou) delivers stories of the marginalized, the underdogs, weaving together a provincial cosmos from a panoply of nearly palpable voices, finally insisting in his fiction on “the indestructibility of man” ... Ikonomou lets loose astounding images ... They are protests against the loss of story, and reach into the primal place in our souls.
—Leeore Schnairsohn, Los Angeles Review of Books

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