A review by emilyacres
Good Will Come from the Sea by Christos Ikonomou

3.0

Though we all agree that these days, with the country in the gutter, a real man, a hero, isn't the guy who fights evil, but the guy who learns to live with it.

Good Will Come from the Sea is a meditative collection of four interconnected short stories centered around the impact of the economic crash in Greece. All the characters live on the same small island and each is in the throes of deep internal turmoil due to the personal devastations of the recession. Crime, poverty and loss connect these stories as much as the characters do. The stories are fueled by anger and impotence. The men rail or despair against their current circumstances in their internal monologues.

The style is an unconventional stream of consciousness. For example, one story's narrator experiences much of his thoughts as though being interviewed in front of a live studio audience, no doubt as a crutch to his loneliness. Some stories I found a bit more opaque than others and so had a harder time grasping the full significance of the given part—and there is so much significance to these stories. A couple misses hardly diminished how hard-hitting and brutal this book can be. It showed me a new Greece, the one behind the white-washed hotels of Santorini and turquoise waters of Mykonos.