After my father's will banned my siblings and me from attending his funeral, I channeled that pain into writing a novel about brothers and sisters stealing their father's coffin. The emotions were real, but the characters and tragi-comic plot of Stealing Dad are entirely fictional. Though I grew up in England, I have lived in and written about Athens for 25 years, so it felt natural to include Greek characters. One of them, Alekos, is a wild sculptor who dies in London, and his daughter Iris—one of seven scattered half-siblings—lives near Victoria Square, one of Athens' most fascinating neighborhoods.
In the 1960s, Plateia Viktorias was a fashionable area, home to the finest restaurants, shops, and theaters. Interwar townhouses were being torn down, replaced by six-story apartment blocks going up so fast that construction dust and constant drilling were the main nuisances. Today, elegant marble-lined halls with wrought-iron and glass doors still bear traces of a vanished bourgeois life, but the square has transformed into a vibrant, multicultural hub.