Greece is a place of inheritance before it is a home for Sofia Papastergiadis: it names her father’s origin, a language she does not speak, and a family history marked by separation and uneven access to money. The country also enters the narrative through talk of national insolvency and shortages. When Sofia eventually travels with her father toward Athens, that distant background becomes immediate, embodied in the household she has not known and the Greek conversations she still cannot follow.

Ancestry, language, and distance

Sofia’s connection to Greece is mediated by her father. She explains that he is Greek, while she was born in Britain and her mother is English. Her surname makes that ancestry visible to other people, but it does not give her fluency: she describes the embarrassment of being named Papastergiadis without speaking her father’s language. When someone speaks a full sentence to her in Greek, she has to explain that she does not understand. Greek identity is therefore both hers by descent and something from which she feels excluded.

The distance is also marked in Sofia’s reflections on place and memory. Her mother taught her to write the Milky Way’s name in Greek, joining a family lesson to a story about Aristotle looking at the Milky Way from Chalcidice, east of modern Thessaloniki, where Sofia’s father was born. The detail sits beside her laptop’s starfield screensaver: its stars seem to offer a private universe, but they are only two years old and made in China, while the oldest real stars are about thirteen billion years old. Greece enters this image not as a visited landscape but as a point of origin held inside a personal, technologically mediated memory.

Crisis and the language of national decline

At the beach in Spain, Greece is discussed against the scale and economic condition of its neighbor. A man asks Sofia whether she is Greek and says that Greece is smaller than Spain but cannot pay its bills. Sofia asks whether he means the economy. He explains that he is studying for a master’s degree at the School of Philosophy at Granada University and has taken summer work at the injury hut; if the Coffee House is still hiring after graduation, he expects to go to London. His remarks place Greece within a wider landscape of precarious work and uncertain prospects, rather than presenting national identity as an abstract matter of heritage alone.

The phrase he uses to describe the end of a dream becomes a question about who is entitled to declare an ending. He admits that he does not believe the phrase and may simply have read it somewhere. Sofia considers its implication: a dream must have begun before it can be said to be over, and the dreamer, not an observer, should decide when it has ended. The exchange gives Greece a double place in the book’s vocabulary: it is associated with a public account of financial failure, but that account is also treated skeptically, as language that can be repeated without being personally believed.

Family wealth and unequal obligations

Greece is tied to Sofia’s estranged father through a sharp contrast between inherited wealth and family support. Her father undergoes a religious conversion and later marries a woman four years older than Sofia; at sixty-nine, he has a baby daughter with his twenty-nine-year-old wife. A few years before meeting her, he inherited a fortune from his grandfather’s shipping business in Athens. Sofia imagines that he may have taken the inheritance as a sign that he was on the right path, arriving as his country was going bankrupt and accompanying what he experienced as love and a new child.

Yet that wealth does not reach Sofia or her mother. She has not seen her father since she was fourteen, and she says that he has not given up a single euro of his newly acquired fortune. She consequently describes herself as her mother’s burden and creditor: Rose Papastergiadis depends on her care, and Sofia repays the debt with her legs, constantly running around for her. The language turns care into an account between mother and daughter, while the fortune associated with Athens remains outside their reach. The contrast makes Greece’s economic crisis personal without implying that national hardship explains or excuses the father’s choices.

The journey toward Athens

Greece becomes a lived setting when Sofia travels with her father and his family toward Athens. Alexandra and the baby, Evangeline, are helped into the back seat, while Sofia’s suitcase is in the boot and she sits beside her father. He drives down the motorway, repeatedly checking the family in the mirror and smiling at Alexandra to reassure her that he is present. The scene gives Sofia a view of a functioning family routine from within the car, but also makes clear that she is newly entering a household whose closeness has developed without her.

On the drive, her father asks where she is living. Sofia explains that she sleeps in the Coffee House storeroom during the week and at Rose’s on weekends. She tells him about her unfinished Ph.D., her sleepless nights, and her duties to her sick mother; she also says that she can now drive, although she has not yet obtained a licence. His questions about rest and afternoon naps belong to a family rhythm that does not match her precarious working and caregiving life. When Evangeline makes a choking noise, he and Alexandra speak Greek about the baby’s health. Her father explains that medicine is in short supply because of the crisis. Greece’s economic condition thus appears not only in a slogan about unpaid bills but in a practical worry about a child’s access to medicine.

The journey does not erase Sofia’s linguistic or familial distance. Alexandra asks why she does not speak Greek, and her father answers for her in English. At the same time, Sofia finds that she likes saying Papa, a small change in how she addresses him rather than proof that their estrangement has been resolved. Greece’s narrative significance rests in this unresolved closeness: it is the homeland Sofia inherits without its language, the setting of wealth that never supported her, and the place where she begins to encounter her father’s new family directly.