My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when she found out.

Niko Kiriakos, tentative heir to the ailing Calypso Shipping fleet, always suspected he was cursed. Following his sudden disappearance, his wife, Anna, and daughter, Zoe, are left adrift. Unmoored, they begin to test the boundaries of their lives, struggling with issues of loyalty, identity and what it means to be a family. Spanning years and tracing a route from Niagara Falls to Greece, Escape Plans is an unblinking look at the ties that bind us together and the things that pull us apart.

“Vlassopoulos has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books

Teri Vlassopoulos has published two books, a collection of short stories, Bats Or Swallows (Invisible Publishing), which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and a novel, Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing). Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Quarantine Review, Open Book, and more. She also publishes a regular Substack newsletter, Bibliographic. She lives in Toronto.

Teri Vlassopoulos' profile page

“The rotating point-of-view structure in fiction has started to become somewhat of a literary trope to me, often unnecessary and even distracting. But I love how Teri uses it with purpose here.”—Booklog

“Vlassopoulos has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books

“While there’s nothing showy about Escape Plans, and getting used to the structure takes a few chapters, eventually the deftness of the novel’s construction becomes overwhelming, and I finished the book asking myself, ‘How did she do that?’”—Pickle Me This

“While Escape Plans has its basis in tragedy, it’s not without humour and even, sometimes, optimism of a sort. As is often the case in modern fiction, the plot is almost a backdrop to the discovery of how and why things came to be as they are. Escape Plans is a promising debut and hopefully the first of more to come.”—Beach Metro

Reviewers