• Page Turner Award, Finalist

Compelled to fulfill her father's dying wish to find the half-sister he kept from her, Alexia arrives in her father's village of Diakofto on the edge of the Peloponnese. There she discovers a culture she knows nothing about, a country in financial crisis, and an extended family with too many secrets. The Sarinopoulos family has long been marked by tragedy, war, and a shame fanned by idle village gossip. Looming over Alexia's visit and the one trip back to Greece her father had taken twenty-five years earlier is the tragedy of Kalavryta, a Second World War massacre that changed the family forever.

Told in alternating voices of Alexia and Nicolai, who each return to Greece to mourn a loss and find soalce, Nicolai's Daughters uncovers the secret shame that festers in a family, refusing to heal until the truth is revealed.

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Behind the fenced grounds of the museum stood a life-sized sculpture. A scene. Alexia moved closer, knotted her fingers through the mesh. The sculpture had turned green under the sun, rain and all the other things that hit it. Still, the four stone figures seemed so real. A dead man in a suit lay on a blanket; his eyes open to the sky. A woman tugged at the blanket where his body lay. A young boy no more than six or seven pulled at her sleeve as if to persuade her to let go, leave the dead man behind. Another figure stood apart from the rest. A girl, younger, her arms helplessly by her sides.

Alexia searched the girl’s vacant gaze and tightened her grip on the fence. Images flashed. Lights. A chill. Something cold in her hand. The girl must be the same age she was when . . . She couldn’t think of this right now. Not now.

“Things happen to us,” Christina said softly, and put her arm on Alexia’s back. "One day everything okay. The next all is wrong.”