book review an island

How Does a Man Become an Island?

The antihero of Karen Jennings’s latest builds a stone wall between himself and the world that broke him.

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By Lydia Millet

May 16, 2022
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AN ISLAND, by Karen Jennings

It may not be a sure thing, but it’s a good bet: If you write a work of fiction that forgoes a redemptive arc or happy ending, and you also happen to be a woman, sooner or later you’ll get asked the question that’s not unlike being told to smile by passers-by on a sidewalk: Why darkness?

Why, gentle sister, did you not choose the path of light?

The South African author Karen Jennings’s novel “An Island,” her first to be published in the United States, is about an old man named Samuel living in isolation as a lighthouse keeper after a hardscrabble life in an unspecified country somewhere in the south of the continent. The novel articulates a perfectly simple and genuine answer to the above question and neatly heads it off at the pass — history, brother. History.

Samuel grows up poor after his family is violently evicted from its land by rampaging, scorched-earth colonists, and is forced to resort to begging to scrape together a sustenance in the city to which they flee. His father then fights for independence and in the process is permanently disabled. Despite the movement’s victory, the postcolonial corruptions of power turn out to produce new bosses who, despite a cynical veneer of populism, are much the same as the old.

Though he doesn’t go so far as to kill, a young Samuel gets swept up into a destructive “culling” of foreigners in the city — a xenophobic massacre incited by a general who will soon be a dictator — and his participation becomes one of many sources of deep shame. Eventually, following his peripatetic, halfhearted involvement in another revolutionary gesture, so ill conceived it ends up amounting to little more than a minor riot, Samuel spends 23 years in prison.

When he’s released at long last, the world outside has been transformed beyond recognition (not that he’d navigated it with any confidence to begin with). His estranged sister and her children treat him with contempt and cruelty, while the only woman he’s ever cared for romantically never held him in high esteem — and, decades later, is now an aging prostitute who barely remembers his name.

So he takes refuge on a harbor island, where he exists in a kind of exhausted, solitary respite, performing his duties to the lighthouse, raising chickens, tending a small garden and maintaining the stone wall he’s built to demarcate his lonely domain, protecting it from incursions from the outside. When the occasional body of a refugee washes up on the shore, he adds it into the wall.

But when the novel opens, one of those washed-up bodies turns out not to be a corpse after all. By now a 70-year-old hermit who’s increasingly paranoid and delusional, Samuel spends the duration of the story contending with the alarming presence of this living newcomer — a man who, unlike so many others, treats him with a trust and even a kindness he can’t perceive or hope to return.

“An Island,” which was on the longlist for Britain’s Booker Prize in 2021, is beautifully and sparingly constructed. The sections in the narrative present are a tactile evocation of the natural and material world around these two men; and in the flashbacks to Samuel’s coming-of-age and then torturous captivity, Jennings renders a gritty and stripped-down portrait of the bleak family dynamics and social conditions that made him who he is.

As he struggles in past and present to dig himself out of the psychological ruts of poverty and desperation, moral polarities come to be reversed. “What might he have been if he had been braver,” Samuel used to ask himself as he walked around the city at night, “if he hadn’t been afraid of murder?”Both in the city and on the island, he lives in the distorting shadow of a cowardice he first witnessed in his father — a denial of the reality of political betrayal, a disintegration of ideals. His father, too brittle and compromised to confront the evidence that his own sacrifice has resulted in the same abuses of power he once fought to eliminate, sees the bare tin walls of despotism and stubbornly calls them gold.

In Jennings’s hands, this antihero’s enmeshment in his own failures has a textured credibility that’s hard to look away from. At every turn he disappoints himself, as well as others; at every turn these disappointments settle atop each other like the bodies he buries beneath the stones.

“An Island” is a character study with the cross-cultural resilience of a fable, like Kobo Abe’s “ The Woman in the Dunes ,” operating on personal and symbolic planes at the same time.

How does a man turn into an island? Oppression and scarcity and disempowerment, yes; the bafflement of trying to form coherent selfhood without strong role models, certainly; and at the base, always, an absence of empathy and of love.

No plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully, whose strength lies in its deliberate pacing and sharp dispensation of detail. Samuel is as real as a shaking hand.

AN ISLAND, by Karen Jennings | 210 pp. | Hogarth | $25

Lydia Millet is the author, most recently, of “A Children’s Bible.” Her next novel, “Dinosaurs,” will be published in October.

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by Karen Jennings ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2022

A stark, efficient, and compelling revision of Robinson Crusoe.

A lonely lighthouse keeper encounters a refugee and a host of uncomfortable memories.

At 70, Samuel has grown used to the occasional body of a drowning victim washing ashore, interrupting his existence as the sole occupant of an island off the coast of Africa. The latest arrival, however, is breathing, which brings both comfort and fear. Comfort because the stranger relieves Samuel’s extreme isolation; author Jennings slowly reveals that he spent 23 years in prison under a dictatorship and has been living on the island for more than two decades since. Fear, because the refugee speaks a different language, and though he seems docile, Samuel’s memories of cruelty and violence have reemerged, prompting an intensifying paranoia. In flashbacks, Samuel recalls how his (unnamed) home country escaped colonization only to lapse into a dictatorship and how the turmoil divided his family and brought him into the orbit of activists—and, eventually, prison. In deliberately plainspoken prose, Jennings makes a potent allegory out of Samuel’s relationship with the stranger. Who owns the territory Samuel is on? What does he owe a stranger arriving on it? Where’s the line between an urge to protect and a deranged fear of invasion? (The island itself is a craggy symbol of human nature. As one man told Samuel, “It’s no good trying to tame the island to your will. It will do as it wants.”) Jennings handles these questions supplely, rooting them in Samuel’s character, which deepens as this brief novel goes on. We learn, in time, about his childhood in poverty and a streak of cowardice that’s led to multiple poor decisions. The stormy mood Jennings conjures throughout the novel keeps Samuel’s decision regarding the stranger intriguingly uncertain until the final pages.

Pub Date: May 17, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-44652-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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Review: 'an island,' by karen jennings.

It is an awful, uncomfortable yet indisputable truth that we, as societies and individuals, often treat differently those who look or love or sound or worship differently than we do. We don't always become suspicious, but too often we do. We don't always feel threatened, but too often we do. We don't always respond with violence, but too often we do.

Sometimes these contrasts come purely from hatred. We need only tune into the news to be bombarded with plenty of examples. But humans are complicated, and often the reasons for their actions are complicated, too. Not necessarily more justifiable, just less tidy, less easily dismissed.

Karen Jennings' "An Island" probes the roots of why we treat others with such reductive inhumanity, even at times against our rational intentions or interests. The novel, which was long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize, is set in a fictional African country — Jennings is South African — whose past includes periods of colonization, independence, dictatorship and popular uprising, periods that stoke division, fear and aggression.

This history is outlined through the recollections of Samuel, a septuagenarian lighthouse keeper who lives alone on an island. During the 23 years he's held his position, he has never returned to the mainland, interacting only with the men from the supply boat every couple of weeks. Samuel sought the job shortly after being released from prison, where he was held for more than two decades, during which he was isolated as a known informant.

Colonizers drove Samuel's family out of the "green and warm" valley where he grew up. In the city his family lived on the streets, where he and his sister begged for scraps. As a teen, Samuel was not interested in the independence movement that enticed his father, and instead "loitering became his daily habit." Rarely does Samuel become an active participant in any event, content to observe, to react and to be acted upon. When he counters his inclinations, he finds only shame or worse.

Much of the story reads like an allegory, but Jennings, despite her insight, never implies that Samuel's actions are generalizable to a nation. This is simply how isolation, humiliation and disappointment at the hands of friends, family and institutions crafted one man.

Samuel is resilient, too, but not in an up-by-your-bootstraps way familiar to U.S. audiences, though he aspires to that at times: "Who didn't want to be more than they were, who didn't want to rise up out of the dirt and be something?" But those memories haunting him won't let him rise up, and when you have been alone for so long, sometimes memories are your only guide.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.

By: Karen Jennings.

Publisher: Hogarth, 224 pages, $25.

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An Island by Karen Jennings review — the dark horse of Booker 2021

An Island tells the story of lighthouse keeper Samuel

This is a book that gives us faith that the Booker prize judges are doing their job, for two reasons. The first is that this is the dark horse of the longlist, released quietly by a micro-publisher, unreviewed in the press until now, so it shows the judges aren’t just guided by big names.

An Island is the third novel by Karen Jennings, a South African novelist living in Brazil. It throws us into the world of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper who has withdrawn from the world and whose main concerns are looking after his chickens and maintaining his toenails. Oh, and occasionally he harvests corpses — refugees, others — who wash up on his shores. Unfortunately for Samuel, the 33rd dead body to arrive

Book Review: An Island by Karen Jennings

I received an Advance Uncorrected Proof of this book. All opinions are my own. On Sale July 5, 2022 .

Samuel lives alone on a small island. He is the lighthouse keeper. When bodies wash ashore, no one cares and Samuel deals with them. He has lived on this island for more than two decades, never returning to the mainland where political unrest has dogged him his entire life. Then one day, a body washes ashore, only this man is still alive.

This story takes place over just four days, all on the confines of the island, with flashbacks to Samuel’s youth and early relationships as well as his time as a political prisoner. His country is unnamed but presumably one in Africa. Born in the countryside, Samuel and his family were first out of their home when he was a child. His father joins the fight for independence, which results in the country’s first election of their own president. But corruption soon sets in and by the time Samuel is a young man, the president is ousted by a new leader who becomes known as the Dictator. Samuel becomes swept up in political movement and is arrested during a march.

Years later, the island becomes a place of safety, a place that is only his, where he can be removed from the uneasy status on the mainland. The bodies that wash ashore are implied to be refugees from other nations. When Samuel reports them to government officials he is asked if their skin is the same colour as his. This man who survives and comes ashore speaks a different language and fears the boat that brings Samuel supplies. Samuel shelters him but as memories of his own past begin to overwhelm him, he struggles to know who to trust, to distinguish reality and memory and his fear and anger begin to overpower him.

There were obvious reminders to me here of What Strange Paradise , another recent novel about a refugee washed ashore on an island. The books were originally published around the same time (this edition makes An Island more widely available for the first time) so I think those parallels speak more to the largeness of this issue than a true similarity between them. There were also flashes of The Lord of the Flies in the island’s removal from society and the fight for these two men to survive.

Jennings does an excellent job of creating this unnamed country and island and broadly drawing its history while focusing on the single character of Samuel. More knowledgeable readers may be able to name the country but I couldn’t and I didn’t find that to take anything away from my reading. Countries suffering from the longterm impacts of colonization, struggling to define their independence, beaten down by power-hungry men, are all over the world. Jennings wisely lets her readers fill in those blanks and while there are parts that are hard to read, she uses those to remind us of our commonality as human beings.

In the end, there is much left unsaid. How much of Samuel’s fear was correct? Where did this stranger come from and what was he fleeing? We never know. At the same time, I felt that the story ended at the right point and had its own sense of completeness.

Published by Karissa

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7 thoughts on “Book Review: An Island by Karen Jennings”

Sounds interesting, and it’s good to see the Booker longlist including more Commonwealth writers again – it had become far too heavily weighted towards UK/US writers in recent years.

Yes, I appreciated that too. I haven’t read much out of South Africa so it was interesting to read a new perspective.

Were there any other people on this island? The only one I can think of that is smaller (and has smaller islands unto itself) is Cape Verde.

No, he’s the only one. He’s the lighthouse keeper and so the island has the lighthouse, the cottage where he lives, and his garden. Occasionally a couple of men come from the mainland with supplies for him.

This sounds like a good book! I haven’t read This Strange Paradise yet, but I intend to soon. I like when the author doesn’t name the place exactly, because as you suggested, this could be MANY different places, unfortunately.

I kind of like that too. Because I’m not super knowledgeable about the history of many African nations, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be able to identify where this was but it still worked without having a specific place. And as you say, it really could be so many places.

[…] An Island – Karen Jennings (Hogarth, 2022) […]

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An Island (2020), by Karen Jennings

Samuel is an old man living in solitude on a lighthouse long neglected by the authorities. A supply ship visits the island fortnightly but his needs are simple and his facilities are rudimentary to say the least.

From time to time, bodies wash up on the shore. Although this is a universal story of postcolonial corruption and brutality, the initial interest in recovering these bodies from the authorities resonates with the hopes of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — because once they’ve found the bodies, that’s the time when the healing will begin, for the nation, for us all. But before long, the tone changes. The woman to whom Samuel reports the discovery of three bodies wants to know what colour they are.

‘What I am asking is, are they darker than us — their skin — that is what I want to know. Are they darker than you or me?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘And their faces? Are they longer? What are their cheekbones like?’ ‘I don’t know. They’re children. They look like children.’ ‘Listen, we’re busy people. We have real crimes to deal with. Actual atrocities, you understand. We cannot come out to the island every time another country’s refugees flee and drown. It’s not our problem.’ (p.7)

One day a survivor washes up on the shore, and Samuel is confronted by having to share his very limited resources, and by the invasion of his privacy and solitude. Although they cannot communicate because they have no shared language, Samuel speculates about the man and this triggers escalating memories of his past. He remembers his father’s pride in the independence he had fought for, and his refusal to acknowledge that independence had brought corruption and extravagant display and not the expected improvements in the standard of living for ordinary people. He remembers his own reluctance to get involved in protest, and his repugnance for violence. And what fear can make a man do.

He also remembers a wife and child, and all that he lost during 25 years in prison, including his own self-respect and integrity.

Misunderstandings exacerbated by Samuel’s guilty memories accrue, and he begins to fear the stranger…

An Island is the third novel by Karen Jennings , a South African novelist living in Brazil. There is an illuminating interview with her on the Booker Prize website . There she says that what she wanted to achieve was

…to try to understand what impact socio-political events and the legacy of those events might have on an individual. Samuel is not a good man, nor is he a bad man. He is simply ordinary. How has the past imposed itself on him? How does it make him feel about who he is and what his place in the world is?

See also this excellent review at LitNet site in South Africa .

Thanks to Cathy at 746 Books for hosting Novellas in November.

Author: Karen Jennings Title: An Island Cover design by Chong W H Publisher: Text Publishing, 2021, first published 2020 ISBN: 9781922458490, pbk., 182 pages Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books $29.99

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Book Review: An Island, by Karen Jennings

The cover of An Island by Karen Jennings

An Island by Karen Jennings explores themes of loneliness, friendship and revolution in Africa.

Thank you to Emma of damppebbles blog tours and Holland House Books for sending me an Advanced Review Copy of An Island in return for an honest review!

An Island follows Samuel, who lives alone on an island managing the lighthouse. A refugee is washed up on the shore of the boat, and this triggers memories for him about his past life on the mainland. He grew up in Africa under the colonialists and helped his country fight for independence — only to see it fall under the rule of a cruel dictator instead. He spent 25 years in prison before finding the job looking after the lighthouse. Samuel’s story is set over four days, switching between the present day and his past.

You can purchase An Island on Amazon , Waterstones , Foyles , Blackwells and from Holland House Books . It’s also available to read through Kindle Unlimited.

“Do you remember the victory parade, after the coup? All that expense and show?” “Of course I remember it,” Disciple said. He smiled, tapped a finger lightly on one of the cell bars. “I was there. He freed us, brought us salvation from a president who had betrayed us all. A president who had put his cronies in positions of power and who then went on to take everything for themselves. All the rest, the people, and everything else, it was all forgotten.” “How is that different from the Dictator and his motorcade full of his brothers and friends and cousins? He placed them in positions of power too. How is that different? And all the people he murdered?”

An Island switches between Samuel’s life now and his life in the past. This was done really well and I didn’t find it confusing or difficult to follow at all. He thinks back on his past life, growing up in Africa. He has seen the country go from being controlled by colonialists to being controlled by a Dictator, and spent 25 years in prison. After he was released, his sister helped him to find his current job as the lighthouse caretaker. A supply boat visits every two weeks, but otherwise, he is alone.

Because of this, Samuel is now used to being isolated. On his only attempt to visit the mainland, he had a panic attack at the thought of being around lots of people. His life is quite hard to read at times and utterly heartbreaking — both seeing how the country changes (but doesn’t really change at all), and the time with family he misses out on by being in prison. These parts of the book I found incredibly sad and moving.

His relationship with the stranger is also really interesting. The refugee doesn’t speak his language and so they struggle to communicate — there are several times when this causes misunderstandings. I would love to know what the stranger was trying to say at some of the points in the book.

While this book talks a lot about loneliness and isolation, I also felt that Karen did a fantastic job of portraying the themes around colonialism and dictatorship. Samuel and his friends live in poverty growing up. He also struggles with the conflict and political changes, and where he stands. I really enjoyed these aspects of the book and it made it so much more than just a book about a man in a lighthouse.

Overall this is a fantastic read — there was so much more to the story than I had anticipated. Karen has written an intriguing character-led story that packs a lot into its 182 pages! I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading character-driven stories or has an interest in Africa and its history.

The blurb for An Island

Samuel has lived alone for a long time; one morning he finds the sea has brought someone to offer companionship and to threaten his solitude…

A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history. In this new man’s presence he begins to consider, as he did in his youth, what is meant by land and to whom it should belong. To what lengths will a person go in order to ensure that what is theirs will not be taken from them?

A novel about guilt and fear, friendship and rejection; about the meaning of home.

About the author, Karen Jennings

Karen Jennings is a South African author. She holds Masters degrees in both English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. In 2014 her short story collection, Away from the Dead , was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International short story competition. Her memoir, Travels with my Father , was published in 2016, and in 2018 she released her debut poetry collection, Space Inhabited by Echoes .

Karen is currently living in Brazil with her Brazilian husband, and last year completed post-doctoral research at the Federal University of Goiás on the historical relationship between science and literature, with a focus on eusocial insects. In September 2019 her new novel, Upturned Earth , will be published by Holland Park Press.

Karen is also affiliated with the mentorship programmes run by Writivism and Short Story Day Africa, both of which promote writing in Africa. Broadly speaking, Karen’s interests lie in colonialism, historically and in the lasting impact that it has had on the continent of Africa and beyond. She is particularly concerned with the quiet lives of the everyday people who have been mostly forgotten by the politicians, big businesses and the rest of the world. In this way, she strives to give the ordinary a voice that can be heard and appreciated.

You can follow Karen on Amazon through her Amazon author page .

About An Island

The idea for An Island came to Karen during an afternoon nap at a writers’ residency she was attending in Denmark in 2015. In her sleep, she saw an old man, fiercely defending his island against interlopers.

At the time, there was a vast amount in the news about the Syrian Refugee Crisis, which extended to what became known as Europe’s Refugee Crisis. There was a great global outcry against xenophobic responses and calls for humanitarian aid for Syria’s refugees. At the same time, there was almost nothing about refugees from Africa – not about what drove them to flee their nations, or what their dreadful experiences were, nor about their deaths or their futures.

Karen chose to explore the relationship between refugee and landowner, but within an African setting, where xenophobia is as rife as in Europe, though it often manifests itself in different ways despite largely being born of colonialism.

By reducing the action of the narrative to two characters, Karen felt that a complex issue could be rendered in simple ways that allowed for a focus on individual experiences.

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Book Review: Murder at the Gorge, by Frances Evesham

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It takes a great writer to be able to switch between past and present and not be confusing.

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‘Long Island’ is Colm Tóibín’s heartbreaking sequel to ‘Brooklyn’

The author’s latest, an Oprah Book Club pick, brings back Eilis Lacey and revisits the themes of home and loss from a new perspective.

Colm Tóibín has an unhurried way of inviting the reader into his fictional world, like a perfect host who spoils you with delicious food and drink but at such a gentle pace you never feel overfed. Quite the opposite: When the feast is over, you are instantly ready to return for more.

Tóibín has set several novels in a fictional reimagination of his hometown, Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, Ireland. He visits it in “The Heather Blazing” (1992), “The Blackwater Lightship” (1999), “Brooklyn” (2009), “Nora Webster” (2014) and again in his latest, “ Long Island .” In each book, some of the characters’ stories and encounters intersect — some lightly, others with great precision and intensity. A major character in one novel may nod a casual “hello” to someone who is the main protagonist in another work. They have known one another for years, even generations. Each of Tóibín’s novels stands on its own merits and can be read independently. But to be aware of their shared roots is to understand the literary wisdom of finding an entire world of meaning and perspective in one small town. If you are so deeply familiar with its layers of sounds and echoes, you can write them into a symphony.

“Long Island” is a sequel to “ Brooklyn ,” which was a gently told but searing story about the pain and hopefulness of emigration. In the 1950s, Enniscorthy has little to offer the novel’s very young, soft-spoken but increasingly confident heroine, Eilis Lacey, whose older sister encourages her to go to America. Reluctantly, and with sadness, Eilis embarks on what feels like an enforced adventure. In Brooklyn, she lives in an area populated with residents from her homeland, but meets and falls in love with Tony, a son of Italian immigrants. Their love is tested when Eilis has to return to Ireland to support her mother after her sister’s unexpected death. Having quietly wed just before her departure, at Tony’s insistence, the “Americanised” Eilis returns home and keeps her marriage a secret. Her intriguing reappearance in Enniscorthy causes a stir.

Like all émigrés, Eilis learns that the home one leaves behind does not remain frozen in time but continues to be real without those who left. Tóibín shows the oddly dissonant coexistence of the slowly eroding gaps left by the loss of those who emigrated and the émigrés’ own, sometimes warped memories of home.

During her visit, and against her expectations, Eilis rekindles an old promise of a romance with Jim Farrell, a local young man, but she returns to Brooklyn at the end of the novel. “Long Island” revisits the themes of home and loss from a completely new perspective.

Eilis is now in her 40s, the mother of two teenagers. She and Tony live on Long Island, in an enclave of private houses, all built for and inhabited by Tony’s family. It is Tony’s immigrant dream come true — but is it also hers? She hasn’t seen her own mother in 20 years but is expected to blend with her in-laws like a long-lost daughter. Eilis has a keen emotional intelligence and independence of spirit, along with a deep love for her children. Her relationship with Tony fluctuates over the years, but she considers it solid. She doesn’t mind when, because of her political disagreements with Tony’s father (she supports protests against the war in Vietnam, for example), it is suggested that she can spend Sundays on her own, free of the obligation to attend the large family meals.

But her sense of isolation becomes acute when she learns of a dramatic secret Tony has been keeping. Eilis faces this immense challenge with great dignity and self-control. The novel moves into a new gear when Eilis informs Tony that she is going to Ireland to visit her mother, who will be celebrating her 80th birthday. The children, who have never seen their Irish grandmother (I found this a little hard to fathom), will join her later.

In this novel, Eilis experiences the reverse of her original journey: a return home, this time after several decades away and during a profound personal crisis. Tóibín’s most intriguing stroke is the way he softly steps back from his main character to fully reveal and explore the stories of others. Eilis’s mother has become a willful and difficult woman, but with a hidden strength that ultimately helps her daughter understand her own possibilities and make a bold, unexpected choice. Eilis’s old closest friend, Nancy, now widowed and running a chip shop, is the counterpoint to Eilis’s chosen life away from her hometown — including a connection with Jim Farrell. And Farrell himself, who never married and still has love for Eilis, is a quiet but fascinating character, with flashes of a surprising inventiveness. I loved a small moment when Nancy thinks about Nora Webster comforting her after her husband’s funeral, deftly recalling a similar scene in the novel “Nora Webster,” when Nora received a visit from Eilis’s mother. Three widows, three interconnecting narratives mirroring one another without overwhelming the reader with hidden signals.

“Long Island” is a stirring journey, but its author does not showily dictate its speed or direction. He creates a heartbreaking world but does not impose it; instead, he parts a curtain and allows time for a slow, intense deepening of the drama behind it. His characters’ possibilities are instantly recognizable as the types of choices we all consider, but he also emphasizes the importance of truly seeing others and reflecting on how their lives might differ from our own. When Nancy looks at her old friend, she thinks: “In the years when she knew Eilis, she thought, and saw her every day, there was nothing special about her. Now she stood out. She seemed like a different person. Something had happened to her in America, Nancy concluded. She wondered what it was.”

This miraculous novel grows with exquisite intimacy out of the silences left by those who know and feel more than they can say.

Elena Lappin is the author of the story collection “Foreign Brides,” the novel “The Nose” and the memoir “What Language Do I Dream In?”

Long Island

By Colm Tóibín

Scribner. 294 pp. $28

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'Long Island' renders bare the universality of longing

Heller McAlpin

Sometimes a literary character's hold on its author (and readers!) is too strong to ignore. While many sequels feel like attempts to milk a cash cow, others, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge novels, bring fresh delight.

Long Island , Colm Tóibín's heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, is the rare instance in which a sequel is every bit as good as the original.

Brooklyn, which was further popularized by the eponymous 2015 movie starring Saoirse Ronan, concerns a young Irish immigrant torn between her new home and her old one in the 1950s. Eilis Lacey, recently sent to America by her family for better prospects, returns to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, her hometown and Tóibín's, for the funeral of her beloved older sister. Her mother, alone now that Rose is dead, doesn't want Eilis to leave. But Eilis can't bring herself to tell her — or anyone, including the man with whom she strikes up a romance — that she's married to an Italian-American plumber she met at a dance in Brooklyn.

Long Island picks up Eilis' story 25 years later, when she learns that her husband, Tony Fiorello, has impregnated one of his married clients, whose husband has categorically rejected the child. Eilis, too, adamantly refuses to have anything to do with the baby. Tony's family, who live cheek-by-jowl in a cluster of houses in Lindenhurst, Long Island, have always viewed Eilis as an outsider. To escape the tremendous pressure from them to accept this child, Eilis decides to absent herself when the baby is due by returning to Ireland for the first time in more than 20 years. She arranges for her two teenage children, Rosella and Larry, to join her in time for the 80th birthday of the grandmother they've never met.

Everyone in Enniscorthy finds Eilis profoundly changed, "like a different person." She tells no one why she's there, including her testy mother, who lets Eilis know how insulting she finds her daughter's patronizing attempts to fix up her home after such a long absence.

When Eilis stops in to see her former best friend, Nancy Sheridan, widowed for five years, neither woman is open about what's going on in their lives. Nancy, not wanting to overshadow her daughter's upcoming wedding, is keeping her impending engagement to Jim Sheridan, the pub owner whom Eilis jilted 25 years ago without an explanation, under wraps for the time being.

Ah, secrets. Tóibín, whose flawless ear captures the constant murmur of gossip that courses through small towns like Enniscorthy, is also sharply attuned to the unspoken. Such circumspection has long underpinned his fiction, including The Master and The Magician, in which he depicted the complicated lives and carefully repressed sexuality of literary titans Henry James and Thomas Mann with graceful nuance.

As always, Tóibín's narrative restraint heightens tension and allows readers to fill in the blanks. We marvel at his skill as we watch his characters in Long Island become ensnared in the elaborate web of strategically withheld information and calculated partial truths he has them spin.

Long Island shares with The Magician and story collections such as The Empty Family a concern with the pain of the exile's return after a long absence. But while in Brooklyn, Eilis' relationships with two very different men separated by thousands of miles underscores the theme of an immigrant uneasily straddling two cultures, Long Island finds her more deeply rooted in America. Anchored by her American children and her bookkeeping job, Eilis' future wouldn't be in question if not for the situation with Tony's baby. Her subsequent return to Ireland causes a pull not between countries but between reason and romance, moral obligations and what the heart desires. Among the many discussion-worthy questions this novel poses: Which is worse, to betray someone, or to betray your feelings?

Tóibín's portrait of Eilis is sympathetic, both in her youthful dissembling and in her current decisiveness, which borders on intransigence. Long Island finds her not just more mature but more self-assured after decades of marriage, motherhood, and holding her own against her intrusive in-laws. Her imperatives — what she feels she has to do, whether about the unwanted baby or her future — are non-negotiable. When Jim talks about his sadness over her abrupt, hurtful parting years ago, Eilis responds without apparent remorse or sympathy: "It was the way it had to be." But the changes she is contemplating this time involve many people and "many uncertainties," which require time to navigate.

Tóibín handles these uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging back and forth through time to build to a devastating climax. The tragedy of this novel about the universality of longing is that, even 25 years on, Eilis, however decisive, is still not in control of her own life.

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5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

“can a novel be both blunt and exquisite”.

Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Sam Sacks on Colm Tóibín’s Long Island , Maggie Shipstead on Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall , Lara Feigel on Maggie Nelson’s Like Love , Jennifer Wilson on This Strange Eventful History , and Lauren LeBlanc on Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

“The plot may sound like the stuff of soap operas, but Mr. Tóibín is essentially a dramatist of repression. Exposing their feelings, openly acting on their desires, committing their hearts in one direction or another—such decisions are torments to this author’s characters and only come about awkwardly, when their longings or hurts overwhelm them. Irish Enniscorthy, much like Italian Lindenhurst, is an insular, gossipy place where every secret is eventually known by all yet might never be spoken out loud. The exceptionally acute feeling of suspense in Long Island comes not just from waiting to see what will become of Jim, Eilis and Nancy, but from the characters’ struggle to finally express themselves, despite the pain or regret it might bring them. It’s a tricky thing, producing a novel from a style this muted and undemonstrative …

Yet the writing perfectly suits Brooklyn and Long Island , helping to capture the decency and ordinariness of the characters as well as the deep emotional ruptures that drive them toward disorder. The confrontations between these people, so long delayed, feel momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, I think, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.”

–Sam Sacks on Colm Tóibín’s Long Island ( The Wall Street Journal )

“Can a novel be both blunt and exquisite? I’m not sure I would have known how to imagine such a work before reading Whale Fall , Elizabeth O’Connor’s excellent debut. Brief but complete, the book is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude … the novel does an exceptional job of getting at the tension between the big picture and the small one. To different eyes, the same island might look like a prison or a romantic enclave, but to actually apprehend the truth of a place or person requires patience, nuanced attention and the painstaking accrual of details. Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book’s end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve.”

–Maggie Shipstead on Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall ( The New York Times Book Review )

“A decade after The Argonauts became the bible of English graduates everywhere, the essays in Like Love arrive to help us understand Nelson’s place in a culture where, to her half-delight, she has become such a powerful voice. Spanning two decades, they range from appreciations of influences including Prince and Judith Butler, to wild, freefalling conversations with figures such as Björk, Wayne Koestenbaum and Jacqueline Rose. There is a passionate, wondering account of her formative half-erotic friendship with the singer Lhasa de Sela. The writing isn’t consistent, any more than her books are. But I like to take my thinkers and writers whole, as she does. The essays offer a kind of composite self-portrait, and illustrate how she thinks, sometimes painstakingly, sometimes with casual jubilance, about some of the central dilemmas of our time …

Because Nelson likes writing about her friends, there’s a kind of homogeneity to much of the book that cumulatively left me feeling a little claustrophobic, longing especially for the roominess of time travel…Which is not to say that she’s wrong to write about the people in her circle. The brutality of the present moment may require us precisely to batten down the hatches and commit to extreme solidarity. At a time when institutional life is collapsing, when the pandemic privileged family over friends, when work expands in ways that leave many too exhausted to socialize, Nelson demonstrates what it means to dedicate yourself to a cohort with seriousness and strenuousness … Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have.”

–Lara Feigel on Maggie Nelson’s Like Love ( The Guardian )

“Messud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction, as if in defiance of this tendency. The novel brims with details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled Everything That We Believed In , that her paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it …

Some readers will bristle at This Strange Eventful History and the pains it takes to account for the lost sense of belonging felt by the pieds noirs , who treated Algerians like strangers in their own land. One could accuse Messud of treating her family’s history like a family heirloom, which is to say, over-delicately. Messud is fond of quoting a piece of advice from the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. In 2020, she summarized it for the Web site Literary Hub, saying, ‘It’s not my job to tell you that horse thieves are bad people, it’s my job to tell you what this horse thief is like.’ Messud risks the accusations above to do her work well.

In This Strange Eventful History , she unswervingly tells us what the pieds noirs are like—a people too homeless to feel responsible for squatting, too poor to see themselves as colonizers, too in love with their conquest to sense anything wrong with the liaison. The Cassars cling to an idealized memory of Algeria that’s untroubled by reality, the tree of knowledge unshaken, the apple still intact, but Messud trusts her readers to bite down.”

–Jennifer Wilson on This Strange Eventful History ( The New Yorker )

“Of late, many critically acclaimed books embrace mystery and absurdity in a way that both suspends and expands conventionally held notions of time…Their playfulness reveals possibilities and perspectives that might be lost in a novel bound by fact-checked 21st century reality. After all, in a world where nothing feels normal, fiction that embraces a disregard for physics and convention mirrors our new upside-down quotidian lifeTo this end, Kaliane Bradley proves that it’s possible to address imperialism, the scourge of bureaucracy, cross-cultural conflict and the paranoia inherent in a surveillance state through her utterly entertaining novel …

As the story’s momentum builds into that of a spy thriller, Bradley pulls off a rare feat. The Ministry of Time is a novel that doesn’t stoop to easy answers and doesn’t devolve into polemic. It’s a smart, gripping work that’s also a feast for the senses. An assassination, moles, questions of identity and violence wreak havoc on our happy lovers and the bubble they create in London. Yet our affection for them is as fresh and thrilling as theirs is for one another, two explorers of a kind, caught in a brilliant discovery. Bradley’s written an edgy, playful and provocative book that’s likely to be the most thought-provoking romance novel of the summer.”

–Lauren LeBlanc on Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time ( The Los Angeles Times )

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An Island: A Novel Hardcover – May 17, 2022

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Print length 224 pages
Language English
Publisher Hogarth
Publication date May 17, 2022
Dimensions 5.07 x 0.9 x 7.53 inches
ISBN-10 0593446526
ISBN-13 978-0593446522
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A lighthouse keeper.A stranger washed ashore.A timeless interrogation of what it means to belong.

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth (May 17, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593446526
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593446522
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.07 x 0.9 x 7.53 inches
#1,607 in Political Fiction (Books)
#5,340 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
#31,929 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Karen jennings.

Karen Jennings is a South African author currently living in Brazil with her Brazilian husband. She holds Masters degrees in both English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. She has published a short story collection Away from the Dead and a poetry collection, Space Inhabited by Echoes, as well as a memoir, Travels with my Father. In 2019 she published the historical mining novel Upturned Earth. Her most recent novel, An Island, was written with support from the Miles Morland Foundation and was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

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Saoirse Ronan and Domhnall Gleeson in the 2015 film adaptation of Brooklyn.

Long Island by Colm Tóibín review – happy ever after?

The Irish novelist is at the height of his powers with a sequel to Brooklyn, set twenty years later

A sked recently why he had chosen to write a sequel to his much-loved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín said, “The answer is why not? The other answer is that there are very good reasons not. I mean, leave it alone – why interfere with people’s imaginations about what happens to the characters? Also, and this is not true for Hilary Mantel or The Godfather, but in general sequels tend to be pale.”

Not this one. While Tóibín’s palette may be rather lighter on vermilion than Puzo’s – or indeed Mantel’s – Long Island is anything but pale. As for the characters, it is pure pleasure to be back in their absorbingly complex company.

Twenty years have passed since Eilis sailed for America for the second time, leaving local Enniscorthy barman Jim Farrell to return to Brooklyn and Tony Fiorello, the plumber to whom she was already secretly married. Since then she has not once gone back to Ireland. She and Tony live with their two teenage children on Long Island, in a suburban cul-de-sac built for the family by the Fiorello brothers. It is a stiflingly close-knit arrangement. Eilis’s in-laws can “almost see in through her windows”. Tony and his brothers work together. Their wives and children are constantly in and out of each other’s homes. Every Sunday the whole clan gathers for long noisy lunches. For Eilis, now in her 40s and the only one not of Italian extraction, the lack of privacy is sometimes unendurable. It is only slowly that she has carved a kind of peace for herself within it.

That peace is smashed to pieces in the opening pages of Long Island when a stranger, an Irish customer of Tony’s, turns up on her doorstep. Tony’s plumbing, he informs her, has proved “too good”. His wife is expecting Tony’s baby. Since the Irishman has no intention of raising a “plumber’s brat”, when the child is born, he will leave it on their doorstep. Recognising his obduracy – “She had known men like this in Ireland” – Eilis has no doubt that he means what he says. As the baby’s birth approaches and the question of its future remains unresolved, she seizes on her mother’s 80th birthday as a pretext to return to Ireland for the summer with her children.

Her decision, the mirror image of her flight in Brooklyn, leads her directly back towards the road not taken. In Enniscorthy little has changed. Gentle, serious Jim Farrell still runs the pub and has never married. Eilis’s old friend Nancy, five years widowed, manages the chip shop. The town is as cramped by convention as it always was. It is Eilis with her transatlantic gloss who is different, marked out by her clothes, her hair, the unpardonable extravagance of her shiny rental car. Her children don their Irish heritage like a local costume, exuberantly, but Eilis, whose Irishness in Long Island has always set her apart, has become an outsider.

Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for, those parts of themselves that remain resolutely out of their reach. Eilis has grown more self‑possessed since Brooklyn, more direct in the American style, coolly capable of negotiating with her boss and standing up to her mother-in-law, but the habit of silence is hardwired in her. Back in her mother’s house she is as disoriented by longing as she was 20 years before, but in middle age it is a longing that must somehow accommodate the life she has already made, a life that no longer begins and ends with the self. It is no accident that, while the triangular story of Brooklyn was told exclusively from Eilis’s point of view, Long Island shares the close third-person narrative between Eilis, Jim and Nancy, drawing us deeply into the hearts of all three as they move inexorably towards a reckoning. There can be no happy ever after, not when happiness can be won only at the cost of another.

After its explosive opening, Long Island unfolds in a series of small events: a shopping trip to Dublin, a walk on a beach, a wedding. People gossip. Enniscorthy is not a place where secrets can be kept. Much of the novel’s tension comes from the excruciating certainty that the steady accretion of small deceptions can only continue for so long, that sooner or later the delicate balance will be broken, and yet, when it comes, the breaking strikes like lightning, unexpected and shattering. This deceptively quiet novel is the work of a writer at the height of his considerable powers, a story of ordinary lives that contains multitudes. In general, it is true, sequels are pale things, but the exceptions to the rule are glorious, contriving both to satisfy on their own terms and to deepen the reader’s relationship with the book that came before. Long Island can safely count itself among their number.

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