Island
CBC Books | | Posted: July 15, 2019 8:03 PM | Last Updated: August 2, 2019
Johanna Skibsrud
On an imaginary island, one whose socio-economic divide runs deep, an insurrection is brewing. Over the course of a day, the lives of two women — one a rebel, one a diplomat — will be forever changed.
Lota is a restless islander who works at a fish factory but is looking for a larger life. When she meets charismatic leader Kurtz, her life comes into sharp focus. Together, Kurtz's group of misfits plot to overthrow the island's occupying power. They plan to charge the embassy. They plan to capture Ø Com's outer station — the gateway to the entire empire's wireless operations. History does not — Kurtz urges her soldiers — have to repeat itself. As the past and future converge on this one day, a new world order is within reach. They cannot fail.
Rachel is an anxious diplomat who is counting down the final hours of her service on the island. Her family has fled to the capital after escalating racial tensions have put her daughter's safety in jeopardy. She is eager to follow despite the fissures that are starting to show in her marriage. But when she arrives at the embassy and hears gunshots ringing through the corridors, she knows this is no ordinary day. As the hours lengthen and Rachel is held captive, she begins to wonder if she'll ever see her loved ones again and what her complicity has meant as the sinister operations of her government start to surface.
Part fantasy, part parable, Island deftly explores essential questions of history and responsibility. It asks us to consider our legacies of cultural imperialism and the hidden costs of our wireless world. Urgent, illuminating, and thought-provoking, it asks us how we can imagine a future that does not run along the exact same lines as the past.(From Hamish Hamilton)
Lota is a restless islander who works at a fish factory but is looking for a larger life. When she meets charismatic leader Kurtz, her life comes into sharp focus. Together, Kurtz's group of misfits plot to overthrow the island's occupying power. They plan to charge the embassy. They plan to capture Ø Com's outer station — the gateway to the entire empire's wireless operations. History does not — Kurtz urges her soldiers — have to repeat itself. As the past and future converge on this one day, a new world order is within reach. They cannot fail.
Rachel is an anxious diplomat who is counting down the final hours of her service on the island. Her family has fled to the capital after escalating racial tensions have put her daughter's safety in jeopardy. She is eager to follow despite the fissures that are starting to show in her marriage. But when she arrives at the embassy and hears gunshots ringing through the corridors, she knows this is no ordinary day. As the hours lengthen and Rachel is held captive, she begins to wonder if she'll ever see her loved ones again and what her complicity has meant as the sinister operations of her government start to surface.
Part fantasy, part parable, Island deftly explores essential questions of history and responsibility. It asks us to consider our legacies of cultural imperialism and the hidden costs of our wireless world. Urgent, illuminating, and thought-provoking, it asks us how we can imagine a future that does not run along the exact same lines as the past.(From Hamish Hamilton)
Island is available in Sept. 2019.
Johanna Skibsrud is the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists. She also wrote the novel Quartet for the End of Time and the short story collections Tiger, Tiger and This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories.
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From this book
It was not gradual. For at least several seconds Lota lingered, drifting among images from dreams she no longer recalled. But then the images vanished, the dream dissolved. She sat up in bed, already fully awake.
Her clothes had been laid out carefully the night before and now she dressed quickly in a pair of army-green cargo pants and a cobalt football jersey with the Brazilian national team's logo on the front nearly rubbed out.
The room was rented. Up three crooked flights of stairs in an old cable company building that used to house the foreign workers. These days, foreigners hardly ever came to the island and, whenever they did, they were flown in and out at the north end. They did their work at the new cable station that had been constructed there, and never actually set foot in town.
From Island by Johanna Skibsrud ©2019. Published by Hamish Hamilton