The Sawyer Free Library will welcome local author Henriette Lazaridis for a discussion of her new book Last Days in Plaka on Thursday, May 9 at 5:30-6:30 pm. The event will take place at the Sawyer Free Library at 21 Main Street in downtown Gloucester.  Registration is not required. 

Featured Buzz Pick on Good Morning America, Last Days in Planka, explores the lies at the heart of an old woman’s identity and the desperation of a young woman’s struggle to belong.  

Searching for connection to her parents’ heritage, Greek American Anna works at an Athens gallery by day and makes street art by night. Irini is elderly and widowed, once well-to-do but now dependent on the charity of others. When the local priest brings the two women together, it’s not long before they form an unlikely bond. As they join the priest’s tiny congregation to study the Book of Revelation in preparation for a pilgrimage to Patmos, Anna sinks deeper into Irini’s stories of a glamorous past and an estranged daughter and lost wealth and the earthquake damage to her noble home. Looking for revelation of her own and driven by a sense that time is running out, Anna makes a decision that puts her in peril, exposes Irini’s web of lies, and compels Anna to confront the limits of her own forgiveness.  

Henriette Lazaridis is the author of The Clover House (a Boston Globe bestseller), Terra Nova (which the New York Times called “ingenious”), and Last Days in Plaka (publishing April 2024). She earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She was the founding editor of The Drum Literary Magazine and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. Her essays and articles have been published in Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and Pangyrus, and earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. An avid athlete, Henriette trains on the Charles River as a competitive rower, and skis, trail runs, or cycles whenever she can. 

The event is open and free to attend at the Sawyer Free Library located at 21 Main Street in Gloucester. Registration not required.  For more information, visit sawyerfreelibrary.org or call, 978-325-5500.