Annilee Newton

writer and writing teacher

Thessalonika

noun

1. The title of my novel about a girl willing to sacrifice her name and her identity to get what she wants

2. The middle name of Cleo Hart, a scholarship student at a prestigious New England university in the 1949

3. A feminized form of “Thessaloniki,” a city in Greece possibly named after Alexander the Great’s half-sister

Cleo Thessalonika Hart knows who she is and what she wants. She’s a college student in McCarthy-era upstate New York, and she wants to be an archaeologist. But when who she is—a female scholar locked out of a male-dominated world—keeps her from getting a fellowship to excavate in Athens, Cleo decides to temporarily conceal her identity by masquerading as the man she may or may not be attracted to.

Ash is handsome, rich, and tired of trying to contort himself into meeting his father’s expectations. When Cleo forges an application for Ash, he receives the fellowship Cleo wanted. They decide that Cleo will present herself to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as Ash, leaving Ash free to sail around the Mediterranean, unburdened by the overbearing scrutiny of his family. The euphoria of finally being in Greece fulfilling her ambition disappears when she runs into Edmund, a British archaeologist she met in New York as Cleo. Edmund turns out to have secrets of his own as a document smuggler for leftist radicals. He uses his knowledge of Cleo’s true identity to blackmail her into participating in a leftist plot to smuggle the young son of a notorious Communist icon across the Iron Curtain into Albania. Cleo must navigate the labyrinths of the past and present, her American loyalties and her desire to protect a Communist kid, and her feelings for Ash to find a way to be herself in a world made of walls. And she has to do it all while avoiding a surprising number of desperate people with guns.

Winner of the 2024 WILDsound Writing Festival 1st Chapter Contest, Thessalonika is a 98,000-word upmarket historical novel. Thessalonika will appeal to readers of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus as a novel with a midcentury female scholar determined to pursue a career the men around her consider off-limits, as well as readers drawn to the McCarthy-era political tension in Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club.