Despina Tunberg

An abusive mother, a father's silence. A daughter who learns to leave a mark of her own. Born unwanted in a poor Greek mountain village, Sophia learns as a small child to read every room for danger before it can reach her - a mother hardened by her own brutal childhood, a father charming and haunted by war and ruined by gambling, and a volatile brother she cannot escape until the family moves to Athens and, at sixteen, she finally leaves the house behind.
The village she leaves keeps a secret of its own - a man who would not let her mother go, found dead beside the creek, an accident no one quite believes. In Athens, Sophia builds a life - until she meets Leo, an American archaeologist carrying wounds of his own, and leaves her marriage in a single afternoon to be with him. Together they build a home on Crete, lose nearly everything to bankruptcy, and rebuild it as artists.
And when the parents she fled are dying, one after the other, she returns to reckon with a mother she can only forgive once she finally understands her. Between the Creek and the Ocean is a novel of survival, family, and forgiveness, drawn from a true story - about what a person does with inherited pain, and the life she builds, again and again, on her own terms.