The Hudson Creek Record - The Keystone Cycle, #2

A 1908 marriage record. Two grandmothers' sentences, sixty years apart, that no longer agree.

Niko Lekkas is seventeen when he leaves Darwin for a converted sponge merchant's house in Pothia, on Kalymnos, to spend two years on a Greek diaspora exchange program. He arrives quiet, jet-lagged, and expecting to learn the Kastellorizan family story his grandmother has been carrying in her mouth since 1947. He gets the Pothia dorm instead.

In a storage room of the Drosos house one January night, Niko finds a parish marriage record from 1908. The name on the record is his. The town on the record is not.

The Lekkas family was Pothia before it was Kastellorizan. Three generations of a story that had been edited down to a single sentence for a Darwin school principal in 1958. The record is small and slow, but it does not go away.

Two years later, Niko returns to Darwin. He apprentices at a Larrakia family's boat-building yard on Hudson Creek under Uncle Bryan and Daniel Mills, on the country and the tides he grew up half a mile from and had never seen the way the people who had been on this coast for sixty thousand years see them. He learns to lay a keel. He learns the tide-names. He learns that his grandmother's choice was not a lie, and that the version she gave him was not the only version, and that both things can be true.

The Hudson Creek Record is the second book in The Keystone Cycle, a five-book literary series following five Greek diaspora teenagers through a four-year exchange program in Kalymnos and across four continents. Each book stands alone. Each book follows one lead. Each book is the slow learning that the family story you inherit is one of several family stories, and that the one your grandmother gave you is not less true because there is also a parish record from 1908 with a different name on it.

For readers of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, Paolo Cognetti's The Eight Mountains, and Jessica Andrews's Saltwater. A coming-of-age novel about diaspora, inheritance, two coasts, and the quiet work of finding out who you are by way of the hands you use.