The United Kingdom is the home base against which Sofia Papastergiadis measures her summer in Spain and her encounter with her Greek family. It is more than a point of origin: London holds her precarious working life and her mother’s home, while her memories of its damp parks sharpen the bodily contrast with Almería’s heat. The country also frames the material bind that limits Sofia’s choices: an unfinished academic career sits alongside low-paid work and a caregiving role financed, in part, through her mother’s mortgaged house.

Home, Work, and Education

Sofia identifies herself as having been born in Britain to a Greek father and an English mother. At twenty-five, she has a degree in anthropology but no settled academic position. She tells the student treating her jellyfish sting that she works for the time being in the Coffee House in West London, where the café roasts its own beans, serves three kinds of artisan espresso, and provides free Wi-Fi. The details give her employment a polished surface, but it remains service work rather than the professional life her education might have led her to expect.

Her connection to London is also precarious in a more literal sense. During the week, she sleeps in the Coffee House storeroom; on weekends, she stays at her mother’s house. In Spain she explains this arrangement to her father, alongside the fact that she lies awake thinking about her unfinished Ph.D. Her work, housing, education, and family responsibilities are not separate strands: limited income and unstable accommodation exist alongside an academic project she has not completed and care duties that occupy much of her attention.

Family Care and Financial Dependence

The United Kingdom is where Sofia’s long investigation of Rose’s unexplained symptoms began. She recalls asking her mother about a headache when she was four, and describes years of trying to interpret changing pains and treatments. UK doctors have prescribed Rose antidepressants for the nerve endings in her feet, one episode in a succession of symptoms and medications that Sofia experiences as an unresolved medical puzzle. Her anthropological training informs how she watches and interprets illness, but the work is also intimate and burdensome: she has learned to treat her mother’s head as if it were her own.

That care has a substantial financial cost. Sofia and Rose remortgage Rose’s London house to pay for treatment at the Gómez Clinic, a total of twenty-five thousand euros. To secure the loan, they attend an interview with Rose’s mortgage provider. Sofia takes the morning off work and loses eighteen pounds and thirty pence for three hours. The scene links medical care to the household economy: the clinic’s treatment is paid for through debt against the home, while Sofia’s low-paid labor and lost wages are part of the price of pursuing it.

The house is also a source of leverage and dependence. The bank considers the loan partly because Rose has already paid off the mortgage, and a surveyor is to assess the property. The family’s London bricks and mortar have financial value even as Sofia’s working life remains insecure. Rose calls her daughter idle and says she is living off her mother; Sofia’s account makes that judgment harder to separate from the practical arrangement in which Rose’s home supports her daughter, while Sofia pays her mother back through constant physical assistance.

Bodily and Environmental Contrast

Sofia’s memory of the United Kingdom is sensory as well as familial. After being stung on a Spanish beach, she longs for its gentle, damp parks and imagines lying on green grass without jellyfish. The recollection turns landscape into a measure of bodily ease: in Almería, she finds no such grass beyond the golf courses, and the hills are dusty and parched. Her split lips, treated daily with lip balm, register the immediate effect of the southern Spanish sun against the cooler, greener place she misses.

Water and temperature also connect the two settings through Rose’s care. In the clinic, Sofia thinks about the different kinds of water and her recurring effort to make water more suitable for her mother. In London, Rose takes anti-inflammatory painkillers each morning with a glass of water Sofia regards as wrong. The contrast is not simply between a home country and a foreign landscape; familiar routines of managing Rose’s body travel with Sofia, even when the surrounding climate and setting change.

A Transnational Point of Reference

The United Kingdom is one point in a family geography that also includes Greece and Spain. Sofia’s father is Greek, and his later life in Greece—with a new wife and baby—stands at a distance from the London household where Sofia and Rose have borne the costs of illness and care. Sofia has not seen him since she was fourteen, and his wealth has not relieved her mother’s financial burden. Her British upbringing and Greek family background therefore coexist without resolving into a single, uncomplicated sense of belonging.

The country also appears as a point of reference for other travelers and for Sofia’s own divided sense of home. Among the people stung on the Spanish beach are tourists from the United Kingdom, placing her temporary predicament within a wider movement of visitors. Yet her longing for home is specific: it is attached to the parks she remembers, the London café where she works, and the household obligations that await her there. The United Kingdom anchors the novel’s account of her life, but it is not a refuge from difficulty; it is the place where her ambitions, dependence, and care work have become tightly entangled.