The thirteen short stories that make up Amanda Michalopoulou's I'd Like read like versions of an unwritten novel: each riveting tale resonates with the others, and yet a sense of their connectedness remains tantalizingly out of grasp. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by the uncanny repetition of certain details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, accidents small and large. Michalopoulou's characters are both patently fictitious and profoundly real, as they move through a world in which even the smallest of everyday occurrences can take on enormous significance. I'd Like offers a touching, utterly unique reading experience from one of Greece's most innovative young storytellers.

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric "advances" that destroy rather than heal.