THE ABSENCE YOU DESERVE

A businessman's sailboat arrives in Samothrace and changes the lives of its inhabitants. Mainly of little Michalis, who will see his father drown in his attempt to save the businessman's pampered child. A few years later, Michalis will leave the island once and for all, to make a new start in Thessaloniki. But, he will again feel trapped by fate and will believe that he has lost every chance to find happiness. Overcome by the pessimism of youth, he will choose drugs and nihilism. He will attempt to fight reality with the power of imagination. Only he will enter a terrifying nightmare and find himself the protagonist of an insidious game where reality is intertwined with fiction. A genuine narrator of his life and death, Michalis unfolds his past like a cinematic tour of a dreamscape. His feverish and stormy narrative innocently explores a primal metaphysics and, as he agonizes over atonement, brings to the fore the question of free will: Perhaps victory over fate is really nothing more than a silent defeat, an involuntary submission in checks that you don't have the maturity to realize yet. A few words about the author: Nikos Vlantis was born in 1973. He has published the novels: Alcibiades Desmotis (Apopira, 2000), www.tospitimas.gr (Periplus, 2002), I want to be left alone to think a little (Periplus, 2003) , Greek Psycho, the ultimate neo-Greek psychosis (Oxy, 2004) and The nothingness you deserve (Oxy, 2004). Together with Pavlos Baltas, he co-authored a book on the history of cities: Next Stop: Lost Avenues, a tour through the cosmogony of the European and American metropolis (Futura 2004). He is a collaborator of the literary review Na une milo directed by Lori Keza. He lives in Athens. Reviews (from Greek Psycho): "Something between Trainspotting and American Psycho, Nikos Vladis' new novel tells of contemporary urban neuroses and reads like dancing to hardcore and techno." Nitro magazine "The surreal world of Nikos Vladis looks like a distorting mirror of the über-capitalist pre-Olympic Greek society... Behind the vessel of a literary hero who "uses people as living fuel for the locomotive of his ambition" hides the huge "I want ” which may on second reading be nightmarish – just like the we-live-to-work-future that stretches out before us – but on first reading it makes an explosive literary molotov to be immediately thrown and digested”. Panos Kokkinis, Max "A story of blatant satire, with a hero a modern contractor who embodies all the corruption and modern Greek fraud, as it manifests itself in the public and private sectors - and especially in their intertwining. Ruthless, cynical and predatory, this hero shouts at the top of his voice that his purpose is to take everything for himself. Freelance Library "Nikos Vladis has an opinion about the society he lives in and he has shown it in his first novel Alcibiades Bound. In his fourth book he does not bother to assimilate the scientific knowledge that interests him, he publishes it at the bottom of the page.' Lori Keza, To Vima