- 4 - Locals and foreigners, year-round residents and passing visitors, young faces and old, cross paths under the same sky in different corners of the country. What ties together this multi-voiced human landscape is a bittersweet, sarcastic tone — sometimes blunt, sometimes only hinted at — that reveals the deeper stakes behind the events. Through a patchwork of stories scattered across the land, The Reapers search for the ingredients that make up our collective experience of the Greek summer: the anticipation, the letdown, the tension, and that restless longing for the summer we're always waiting to come back. Two people are together, and then they're not. A breakup in Athens sets off two separate journeys out into the world. And yet, whatever they do, they remain bound to each other in the imagination. They live inside one another; each belongs to the other. Without meaning to, they still read everything through the lens of the relationship, living and breathing in a here-and-now that has nothing to do with the before. And yet everything looks so much the same. Moving between different places, the characters come face to face with loss, changing with every moment without even realizing it. Fotis Manikas writes straight onto his characters' nerve endings. With a careful, and at times dizzying, third-person narration, he pushes right up to the edge to explore how "two" happens when it is "one," and how "one" becomes "two." The Reapers There wasn’t a more convincing argument that they were a couple than the way they looked up at the sky Zacharias Mavroidis Fotis Manikas Pages 264 Pages 296 -FICTION-
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