The Sleepwalker

Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre étranger/Prize for the best foreign novel, France. At the opening of Margarita Karapanou’s stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres—satire; murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd—following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place and its characters like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.