Natalie Bokopoulos will read from The Green Shore, her debut novel set during the 1967 military coup in Greece, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 12, in Prairie Lights Book and a live stream on the University of Iowa Virtual Writing University website.

The coup and the following seven years of brutality and repression is told through the experience of one family’s love and resistance. Eleni, a widowed doctor, struggles with her lost sense of passion, both personal and political, in the face of this latest challenge to democracy.

Her brother, Mihalis, an eccentric poet of some renown, finds himself keeping a low profile as he attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife. Eleni’s daughter Sophie, a student of French literature, gets swept up in the resistance alongside her privileged, left-leaning boyfriend, while her youngest child, pensive Anna, watches events unfold with increasing anxiety.

As the years pass and the dictatorship’s oppressive rule continues unchallenged, their lives unfold in surprising ways, each seeking and finding love and fulfillment as they struggle to make their own peace with when to stay silent and when to act.

Elena Kostova wrote, “Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments.”

Bokopoulos teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, and Granta Online, and has received an O. Henry Award, a Hopwood Award, and a Platsis Prize for Work in the Greek Legacy. She is a contributing editor for the online journal Fiction Writers Review. Each summer she teaches creative writing at the Aegean Arts Circle in Greece.

For accommodations at the live event, contact Prairie Lights at jan@prairielights.com.

For calendar and event information about the UI arts, visit the new Arts Iowa website.