The moving portrait of a European intellectual as she struggles against a life narrative built on socially constructed dead ends

Set in 2017, the novel starts with dynamic and jovial 44-year-old Tina going about her daily life. However, we soon find out that she is secretly planning to commit suicide. How did she come to that decision and why? Can she be saved?

The book unfolds over fourteen different chapters through which we encounter Tina’s entire world: her circle of friends, her children, her parents, her lovers, her students and colleagues (Tina is a university lecturer in Athens). We meet her in a strange forest, a flooded basement, in her Athenian flat writing a book on Balkan cinema, but perhaps most crucially of all, throughout the book, we find her thinking about her closest friend, a girl called Krini who was murdered age fifteen.

As we come to find out, Krini’s death, but also her short life, is the ongoing trauma in Tina’s perception of herself and the world. It is only in the last pages that we confront the reality of Krini’s spectral existence: she was acknowledged as a girl only by Tina whereas everyone else considered her a boy. Krini was buried as a boy, as revealed to Tina by her mother. This resolves the mystery why Tina could not locate Krini’s grave. It also makes apparent to Tina that, despite her lifelong efforts, she does not control the meaning of her past.

TINA, A Story of an Alignment is a masterful deeply affecting novel about living and dying, about hope, love, gender and femininity and the wound of social existence that marks and defines even a quiet life.

Shortlisted for the National Literature Awards 2021, Greece