Overview

"""Pure color!"" wrote Paul Gauguin to his wife, Mette, from the South Seas. ""Everything must be sacrificed to it."" In Off Island, novelist Lara Tupper imagines Gauguin-chasing new light, new color-ran away to a new island, a rugged outpost off the coast of Maine. There, Gauguin leaves behind some paintings and letters, and maybe a child. A hundred years later, another Maine painter, Pete, finds himself torn between his muses-the sturdy, reliable Molly and the unhappy, peripatetic Karla-who promises to take him to other, newer islands. Off Island captures the lure of the unknown and the pull of the familiar, and questions what it means to be loyal to one's art, one's family, and one's home."

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9781645991885

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Reviews

"""Dense with beautiful coastal imagery and thoughtful in its consideration of ill-suited connections, the novel picks at the seams of marriages and affairs with clarity. Though Gauguin's legacy is dark, Off Island, with its moody setting and vulnerable characters, is a novel to savor."" -Karen Rigby, Foreword Review ""Beautifully understated, deft in its details, evocative of place and eras, Lara Tupper's Off Island combines the painter's perception of the visual world with the sensuality and coarseness of the physical world. Masterful and matter-of-fact, Tupper adeptly blends art, character study, and mystery in this compact, elliptical novel."" -Peter Turchi, author of A Muse and a Maze ""What if Gauguin went to the New World? That's the launching point of Lara Tupper's glistening new novel, Off Island, which reaches back into a vividly imagined history and traces it forward into the modern day lives of a tortured artist who may or may not be Gauguin's descendant and the women he loves. In mesmeric prose, rich with sensual detail and a burning empathy for her characters...Tupper blends what might have been with what is and in doing so throws a painter's light on all our pasts and presents."" -Jeremy Gavron, author of Felix Culpa and A Woman on the Edge of Time"

Dense with beautiful coastal imagery and thoughtful in its consideration of ill-suited connections, the novel picks at the seams of marriages and affairs with clarity. Though Gauguin's legacy is dark, Off Island, with its moody setting and vulnerable characters, is a novel to savor. -Karen Rigby, Foreword Review Beautifully understated, deft in its details, evocative of place and eras, Lara Tupper's Off Island combines the painter's perception of the visual world with the sensuality and coarseness of the physical world. Masterful and matter-of-fact, Tupper adeptly blends art, character study, and mystery in this compact, elliptical novel. -Peter Turchi, author of A Muse and a Maze What if Gauguin went to the New World? That's the launching point of Lara Tupper's glistening new novel, Off Island, which reaches back into a vividly imagined history and traces it forward into the modern day lives of a tortured artist who may or may not be Gauguin's descendant and the women he loves. In mesmeric prose, rich with sensual detail and a burning empathy for her characters...Tupper blends what might have been with what is and in doing so throws a painter's light on all our pasts and presents. -Jeremy Gavron, author of Felix Culpa and A Woman on the Edge of Time

Author Information

Lara Tupper is the author of Off Island (Encircle Publications, 2020). Her debut novel, A Thousand and One Nights (Harcourt/Untreed Reads), is an autobiographical tale about breaking the trajectory of career-marriage-family, and her linked short story collection, Amphibians, is forthcoming from Leapfrog Press in 2021 (winner, Leapfrog Fiction Prize). Her short fiction was runner up for the 2019 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature; her prose has appeared in The Believer, Nowhere Magazine, Dogwood Journal, Epiphany and other literary publications. Born in Boothbay, Maine, Lara now writes, teaches, and performs in Western Massachusetts. A jazz/pop vocalist, her latest album is This Dance. Visit www.laratupper.com.

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