Kinship structures

Kinship structures are both a way of classifying family ties and a lived system of care, absence, and debt. The novel sets out kinship as a compact diagram, then unsettles its categories through Sofia Papastergiadis’s estrangement from her father, her care for Rose Papastergiadis, and the new household she encounters in Athens. Family is not simply who belongs to which category; it is also who shows up, who provides, and who carries another person’s daily needs.

Classification and relational roles

Sofia considers kinship through a schematic vocabulary: father, mother, same-sex and opposite-sex siblings, children, husband, and godparent. The list makes absences legible as well as relationships: she identifies no siblings, children, husband, or godparent in her own structure. Yet the categories do not remain tidy boxes. She imagines family members taking on one another’s roles, so that a daughter might become a mother to her mother, or a son might occupy a husband-like position. The resulting structure is recursive: its members can appear within one another’s signs rather than standing in a simple, fixed order.

That instability is central to the concept. Kinship provides names for relations, but those names cannot fully explain how responsibility moves between people. The novel tests the diagram against lived circumstances, where a parent may be absent, a child may become a caregiver, and a new marriage may create a household to which an older child has only partial access.

Care, debt, and embodied obligation

Sofia’s bond with Rose is described through an exchange that is both intimate and unequal. Christos Papastergiadis has not shared his newly acquired wealth with Sofia and Rose; Sofia therefore understands herself as a burden to her mother, while Rose becomes her creditor. Sofia repays that debt with her legs: she runs around to meet her mother’s needs. The metaphor connects family obligation to bodily labor, making care a practical activity rather than a sentimental abstraction.

That labor appears in ordinary routines as well as in medical encounters. Sofia tries to make water more suitable for Rose, and she has become accustomed to managing her mother’s medication. Dr Gómez recognizes how closely the medication ritual has bound mother and daughter, and challenges Sofia to invent another routine after he removes that one. His intervention points to a tension within their relationship: care sustains Rose, but it can also shield Sofia from making a life beyond caregiving.

The family’s economic decisions extend the same entanglement. Sofia and Rose attend a mortgage-provider interview together to secure a loan for the Gómez Clinic. Rose’s paid-off London home makes the loan possible, while Sofia loses wages by taking time off work for the appointment. Their shared pursuit of treatment thus draws on property, income, and unpaid care at once. Kinship here is a material arrangement whose costs fall across more than one generation.

A new household and old absences

When Sofia visits Christos in Athens, she encounters his life with Alexandra and their baby, Evangeline. Christos attends to his present family during the journey, arranging Alexandra’s seat belt and checking on the household as he drives. For Sofia, the scene places her outside a family unit that is being actively cared for, while also giving her a tentative opening toward her father. She begins to use the intimate name Papa and takes part in the household, though she remains conscious of the distance created by years apart and by her lack of Greek.

Sofia’s understanding of the household includes Alexandra’s possible history of abandonment. She reads the younger woman’s affection for Christos and the traces of childhood in their home as signs of a wish for a childhood in which she had not been left. This is Sofia’s interpretation, not a settled account of Alexandra’s motives; its importance lies in how it makes the new family legible through vulnerability as well as formal relation. Alexandra is Christos’s wife and Evangeline’s mother, but Sofia also sees a person seeking security within those roles.

The absence of a relative is made visible in another domestic display. At the house Matthew and Ingrid Bauer made together in Spain, photographs on a corkboard exhibit parts of their respective families, but there is no photograph of Ingrid’s sister, Hannah. The displayed kinship structure records belonging while its omissions point to a relationship that cannot be reduced to the images on the wall. Family representation can show who is counted, but absence remains part of the structure too.

Names, belonging, and the limits of the diagram

Sofia’s surname is one of the few paternal inheritances she retains. Although she has considered changing it to Booth because it would be easier for others to spell, she has not given up the name Christos gave her. She understands it as placing her within a wider world of names that are difficult to pronounce or write. The surname therefore marks both the father who did not show up for her and a form of belonging she chooses to keep.

Across these relationships, kinship is presented as a shifting arrangement rather than a secure chart. It includes biological ties and marriage, but also the labor of care, the movement of money, the experience of abandonment, and the decision to retain a name. The novel’s recursive model does not resolve those tensions; it shows why no single label can contain the changing obligations and attachments among family members.