Overview

The island is a place where things are not quite as they appear; a magical place where the murder of a reclusive woman is not a cut and dried case. 'I thought I had come to the island to wrest control of my life back from the woman who had sabotaged it. But I was wrong. My mother was still writing my plot.' Nikki Black, intent on punishing the mother who abandoned her at birth, goes to the island with only one aim in mind: revenge. But her plans are confounded by the discovery that she has a brother. Not just any brother but a brother strangely possessed by their mother; a brother with a terrifying violent streak; an apparent simpleton whose head is filled with the stories of past islanders, Crofters, Vikings, Little People. A brother whose dangerous love and strange way of seeing the world transform Nikki's life.

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Reviews

The mindscape of an intelligent young woman who has never known any kind of love is brilliantly portrayed...This is a story where there is a kind of cathartic redemption THE TIMES A novel of redemption Nicci Gerrard, OBSERVER Heart breakingly lyrical GUARDIAN Original and compelling ... 'Tempest territory'

Rogers's book makes for the universal, metaphorical realm that also attracts Julia Blackburn, Jenny Diski and Jeanette Winterson. If you like their novels, you will like Island; fans of Rogers's recent historical novels, however, may be less pleased. Told in the first person, through the consciousness of an angry young woman, Nikki, abandoned on a doorstep at birth, the narrative takes us to Aysaar, a bleak and thinly inhabited island in the Hebrides, Scotland, where Nikki tracks down the mother who gave her up. She is taken aback to discover she also has a simple, monstrous brother, Calum. Rogers has always had a gift of imaginative sympathy for those rejected by society, and the developing friendship and tenderness between Calum and Nikki is the best thing in the book. However, despite her developing relationship with Calum, Nikki spends most of the novel planning to kill their mother... It seems impossible that the resulting tangle of incest and matricide can be happily resolved, but Rogers finally manages to square the circle. On another level, this is a book about storytelling. As Calum and Nikki drift together through the island mist, they tell each other folk tales about love and cruelty which teach us how to understand the central story. Reviewed by Maggie Gee, whose novels include The Ice People. (Kirkus UK)

'The mindscape of an intelligent young woman who has never known any kind of love is brilliantly portrayed...This is a story where there is a kind of cathartic redemption' THE TIMES 'A novel of redemption' Nicci Gerrard, OBSERVER 'Jane Rogers is a novelist whose work sings' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Heart breakingly lyrical' GUARDIAN Original and compelling ... 'Tempest' territory' TIME OUT

Author Information

Jane Rogers has written six novels including MR WROE'S VIRGINS (dramatised as an award-winning television serial) and PROMISED LANDS, which won the Writers' Guild Best Novel Award 1996. She also writes for TV and radio, and teaches at Sheffield Hallam University.

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