My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

For such a slim novel, Dendrites forced me to take my time with it. It’s dense and the sentences lengthy, running on to create the rich inner lives of the characters. It follows a couple of generations of Greek migrants to America, from before world war two to the 1980s. I’ve not read much about Greek immigration to the US, and I’m always a sucker for novels that explore the American Dream - and how its seekers become disillusioned given the racism and classism they encounter. In this case, the tension between different ethnic groups was examined, with groups each marginalised in their own ways looking down on other marginalised groups - divide and conquer at play.

I really liked Leto and Minnie, and wish we had heard more from them. It’s quite a masculine narrative, with a lot of focus on the pressures of immigrant men to provide for their families and realise the dreams of those depending on them - both in America and back in Greece. Papadaki captures that desperation very well.

The translator Karen Emmerich did a great job with those run-on sentences, but the style was sometimes quite dry.