The women’s names are Ceu or Irini; the men, José or Stefano. They are Portuguese, Greek, Spanish or Italian. What they have in common is an appalling social and financial situation. The reason: the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Europe, which thought it had protected itself, is still being affected by the risks it was convinced it had avoided. At the epicenter of the current crisis, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal have taken on the role of scapegoats. Rich countries to the north, poor to the south; where unemployment sometimes concerns one quarter of the population. The chasm that has now opened will be hard to close. And the comments, particularly from Germany, about Southerners who are more interested in siestas and la dolce vita than in hard work, will be hard to forget. The recent referendum in Greece was perhaps just the first sign of that. The eight first-person accounts of ordinary people gathered together in this book create significant and symbolic portraits of this complex and dramatic crisis, by incarnating it in ways that will make readers feel both moved and indignant.

Ordinary Greek, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese people explain how they have been affected by the crisis, which they are the principal victims of. Through the portraits created by these first-person accounts, readers come to see the true lives of those who are now surviving.