Escape Plans

My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles
northeast of the port of Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were
at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us,
and I was at school when she found out.

Niko Kiriakos,
tentative heir to the ailing Calypso Shipping fleet, always suspected he
was cursed. Following his sudden disappearance, his wife, Anna, and
daughter, Zoe, are left adrift. Unmoored, they begin to test
the boundaries of their lives, struggling with issues of
loyalty, identity and what it means to be a family. Spanning years and
tracing a route from Niagara Falls to Greece, Escape Plans is an unblinking look at the ties that bind us together and the things that pull us apart.

“Vlassopoulos
has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate
goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world
of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books