Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper, is a man’s attempt to overcome grief and guilt through storytelling.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, September 3, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Joachim Frank’s profound prose, thought-provoking themes, and ability to craft unique, multi-dimensional characters all shine in his new novel, Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper. The story follows Reiner, now retired in the Berkshires, who reminisces about the times he spent with his younger sister, Monika, who succumbed to cancer in her early fifties. His memory centers around traumatic events during a trip he took with her to Crete in the 1960s, which left Monika with emotional scars and Reiner with a perpetual feeling of insufficiency and guilt.

Throughout the novel, Joachim Frank transports readers to the landscape and culture of Greece. Between glimpses of its ancient cultures, Crete comes to life in its spectacular atmospheric light. Its own brand of Greek island music and the vitality of its people are shaped by European echoes of the Vietnam protests and hippies flooding pristine beaches.

As time progresses and history unfolds on the page, the siblings’ ensuing trajectories take them through Europe against the background of Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the completion of the Chunnel and the advent of the Internet. In the final chapters, set in Barcelona after his sister’s demise, the growing tension between the truth and Reiner’s revisionist history leads to a breaking point.

Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper has received rave reviews.

“This is a very interesting and striking novel. The language both in terms of the descriptive passages and the dialogue is evocative and complex. The dynamics between Germany and Greece, between Crete and Manhattan in that wonderful closing and bracing passage, between siblings, and between the contemplative/narrative viewpoint and an individual who might forever be beyond meaning or understanding are well rendered. It is a compelling and at times summer story, and the reader is always worked.”

—Nicholas Birns, author of Theory After Theory and Contemporary Australian Literature

“In this beautifully realized and artfully layered novel Joachim Frank takes us from the isle of Crete, where sun and Eros reign, to the gray rigors of Protestant Germany, to the improbable labyrinths of Gaudi’s Barcelona. Our traveling companion is Reiner, complex, occasionally reprehensible, always engaging. With us also is Reiner’s sister Monika, a winning character possessed of fine artistic intuitions. In another novel (think of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice) the effect of Mediterranean permissiveness on Germanic discipline can be fatally corrosive, but here the lessoning is softer if still powerful. Monika comes home with a new eye for color and pattern, which she stitches into her quilts. Reiner experiences in the warm moonlit nights of Ierapetra intimations of a world beyond the rational. This will temper forever his passionate inquiries as a scientist. Ierapetra is an incisive study of character as it encounters the cultural and the metaphysical Other.”

– Eugene K. Garber, author of Maison Cristina and The Eroica Trilogy

Excerpt from the book:

“Reiner dumped his belongings on the upper bunk bed, just in case he had to share with another traveler, and sorted out his bathing suit and towel. He fished the notebook out of his backpack and opened it up. The empty page stared back at him in the dim room; the blinds were drawn all the way down to keep the heat out. Thin pencils of light, like legs of a spider, stretched out onto the walls from the sides of the window, advanced on the floor, and inched up to the top of the mattress he was sitting on. He’d never kept a diary before, but had read those left behind by a lot of famous writers and artists. Goethe’s Italian Journey, for one, was drilled into him in high school.

He’d decided that keeping a diary was a way to become a writer himself, something he had always dreamed of. It would work like a bootstrap; he would write down things from memory, and, upon rereading his entries, would take issue with the way he expressed it. So, he’d redo it all in a more refined, embellished way, then continue on in these cycles of incremental improvements. At least, it was a start.”

Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper is available for purchase on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0SprktF

The author is available for interviews and the book is available for review.

Libby Bell
DartFrog Distribution
[email protected]

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