Let Me Explain You

The many characters in Annie Liontas's first novel, Let Me Explain You, can't quite explain exactly what's going on. A twice-divorced father of three is convinced he's dying in 10 days; he's not sure how or why, but he knows his death is looming with the same confidence that he knows that his family never respected him and the world will miss him when he's gone.

The novel's perspective shifts from the family's patriarch, Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, to the women in his life who he feels disrespected him, alternating accounts for a story that is equal parts farcical humor and heartbreaking character study. Mavrakis came to the United States from Greece almost three decades before the events of the novel, as a new husband, an abused and forgotten son and a delusional optimist. He's obsessed with the idea that he's too good for Greece and is immediately disappointed that the U.S. isn't good enough for him. When he's finally built a life for himself and realizes he's still unfulfilled, he has a vision of his own death and writes his daughters a letter that tells them all the ways they've managed to ruin him.

Let Me Explain You depicts an immigrant's experience in the U.S. and treats its characters with so much empathy and tenderness that it's hard not to think of the Mavrakis family as any other than the reader's own. Like all families, immigrant or otherwise, the Mavrakises encounter profound struggle, but what marks their true character is the way they navigate it. --Josh Potter

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