‘See them all in this moment, at the crest of the wave before the wave breaks. Quick, look. Time will only stand still for so long. There. The moment is over. The wave breaks. Time moves on. There’s no stopping this now.’

Victorious Dust traces the lives of three generations of a Greek family from the end of WWII and the eruption of the Greek civil war to the eve of the infamous 2015 bailout referendum.

In attempting to tell the story of his father’s life and death, Michalis Xenidis finds himself recreating the history of an entire country and era, telling the stories of British army officers and Greek collaborators, of royalists and communists, the rich and the poor, the living and the dead, and just perhaps a ghost or two. Decades later, his son, Andreas, who once dared to think himself free of the weight of all this history, is about to find out those ghosts won’t stop haunting you just because you refuse to believe in them.

Exquisitely written, daring and tender, Victorious Dust is both an unforgettable multi-generational family saga and a critique of the impulse to treat the past as explanation or solution for our present; a kaleidoscopic meditation on history and the impossible desire to escape it.

Kostas Kaltsas’ heroes might find no redemption at the end of their dive into the wreck of the past, but, like the reader, they are left brilliantly ambivalent, euphoric, and wiser, and a little more determined to face life’s deepest questions.