"He was fallen, wounded. On the balcony, there was a plate with peach peels and a sparrow was pecking at them. Despina was sitting with her back turned, looking outside. She didn't turn around. Her back was straight. With blood on her hand, she had painted, deep red against the whiteness of the wall, the sparrow."

In Spourgito, a foreigner with a severed tongue enters a village in Pogoni, Epirus and becomes its silent center, with the suffocating community of the village revolving around it.

"He arrived at the first houses of the Village and some kids were playing there. They saw him - a scarecrow on a donkey - and hid behind a corner. They had blowpipes; quickly, they collected goat droppings from the road and put them in the blowpipe. At first, he thought that fat flies were sitting on him and tried to shoo them away with his hand. They saw him waving his hand like that, burst into laughter, and then Graham saw the kids with blowpipes in their hands, understood, and unleashed all his missing teeth in a wide, toothless smile."

Just like Spourgito, the novel titled Graham speaks about how love and kindness can flourish in a ground that is inherently barren or has been left to desolation - here with a protagonist being an alcoholic painter on an island, a person who, with his raw sincerity and deep humanity, resembles a saint."