I’ve been to the islands in my summer reading this year: Norwegian, Atlantic Canadian, Jamaican, Greenlandian and Sri Lankan.

Roy Jacobsen’s Ingrid trilogy landed in my stack thanks to a reading copy of White Shadow from Biblioasis, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. Partly because I liked the title of the first volume, The Unseen, I started from the beginning (also because I’m bent that way, but the title helped).

A passage from early in the first volume offers a glimpse of the books’ tone and style, as Jacobsen describes the bottles that wash up on the shore of the Norwegian island, Barrøy, the family inhabits. They might “boil the bottles and fill them with redcurrant juice, or else simply place them on the windowsill in the barn as a kind of proof of their own emptiness, leaving the sunbeams to shine through them and turn green before refracting downwards and settling in the dry straw littering the floor.”

First, you have a sense of the pace; there is time to notice the sunbeams in this narrative. They also turn green, when their light refracts, so this is not the kind of glass I would find walking the shores of Lake Ontario.

There aren’t a lot of other ways to compare one’s experiences on an island, and we’re reminded of the isolation when the bottles compare their own bottle experiences to one another in the context of emptiness (not satiation).

Biblioasis, 2021

And, finally, there’s a thing about that red current juice, that comes much later, but that would be spoilery (the point being that Jacobsen knew what was in the rest of the decanter long before he poured the last glass). As a writer, he’s a planner not a pantser.

It’s not that nothing happens. In one sense, living on an isolated island means that even a small change would be a significant change. But there are momentous interior developments in Ingrid’s life. And it’s not hard to fathom because there are plenty of compelling stories rooted in a single family’s experiences, even though this family is island-bound.

We have, for instance, Ingrid—a daughter—and Maria—a mother.

So, here’s one: “Ingrid wonders why she was ever fearful, perhaps she just waited on the island too long, she thinks, it wasn’t that the world didn’t want her, she may have misread the situation, and she is not going to make the same mistake again; the possibility that it might have been her mother who held her back, Maria’s loneliness, doesn’t cross her mind.”

And, here’s the other: “To regret having a dream is the most debilitating experience there is. She regretted thinking the island was too big, with all the endless work it entailed, and wishing for more children, because she had Ingrid.”

(These two quotations consider different events, pulled from passages at great distance from one another, to avoid spoilers.)

And even though the island is at the heart of Ingrid’s story, the world beyond the island (first, non-existent and, later, even when it is inconsequential) is significant in its own way, from the begining:

“There has always been a conflict inside him between sea and land, in the form of a restlessness and an attraction: when he is at sea he longs to be at home and if he has his fingers in this oil he always catches himself staring at the sea and thinking about fishing. But there has been a balance in this toing and froing, an acceptable interdependence, which is now under threat.”

And, as Ingrid grows, and her understanding increases, too, the world beyond takes on a more pressing relevance. The narrative handles her changing perspective delicately and astutely:

“…straightened her back and looked around, the houses in the grey mass up on the island’s humped ridge, visible at a distance of fifteen to twenty sea miles in clear weather, now just small, black boxes beneath a thin layer of milk, no light, no tracks in the snow.”

The language is often lyrical (I particularly like the kind of passage that unites atmosphere with experience, as when “the winds that range across the taiga have left their mark like a comb in greasy hair”) and the style is contemplative, but whereas these qualities might slow a reader’s progression, the short chapters and tightly knit cast maintain interest throughout.

In other island stories, Carol Bruneau landed hard on my TBR because I will be reviewing her new novel for PRISM international in September. Her 2005 novel, Berth, is about a marriage in which temperaments must be delicately balanced: “The last thing in the world you wanted was to disturb Charlie. God knows he did his bit for us every day. The least we could do was let him tinker in peace.” That’s Willa talking, a military wife, before Charlie receives an assignment that takes him away for months at a time and leaves Willa and her son, Alex, in peace instead. “That whole family thing: it was like the elastic in underwear that got stretched so much everything dangled,” Bruneau observes. She balances that dangling and sense of possibility (which emerges in unexpected ways in Berth) perfectly with the taut stretch that maintains readers’ interest in Willa’s happiness and Alex’s sense of security. Any of her novels will satisfy readers who enjoy stories about marriage and dis/connection, but Berth is amazing for Nova Scotia shore and island life and These Good Hands and Brighten the Corner Where You Are will satisfy those who yearn for artist-soaked stories (about Camilla Claudel and Maud Lewis, respectively).

Alecia McKenzie’s A Million Aunties (2020) was in my stack thanks to Lisa (maybe Liz too?). Linked narratives and multiple perspectives: I can’t resist. McKenzie handles the technique astutely; she includes subtle links between chapters so that readers can use a detail or a reference to reconnect with a previous chapter and, over time, gradually enter the community. The Jamaican setting is rich with “the waves behind him and the Blue Mountains ahead in the hazy light, he welcomed the heat, the stiff breeze, and the blinding sunlight”. And it’s tasty with “rice and peas, callaloo, and plantains, with fruit punch that was like nectar”. But the overarching theme is how many stories it takes to make a story. How we use story to fill the gaps: “People got uncomfortable when they couldn’t place you, when you didn’t wear the robes they expected you to wear or have the hairstyle or hair texture that provided the much-needed clues.” How story holds possibilities: “I’d lost count of the stories I overheard to explain Miss Pretty’s walking, but the one most often repeated was….” And how story preserves memory: “People have no patience these days. And the last thing they want is stories from old people. So I just said: I met them at the beginning of ’62 to cut a long story short.” There aren’t quite a million aunties between these covers, but there’s evidence that many more exist than can be held in a single volume.

Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen (2014) Translated by Anna Halagar (2018) is set in Greenland. It landed on my stack thanks to Andrew, because once again it presents overlapping narratives: direct commentary from five perspectives, those of Fia, Inuk, Arnaq, Ivik, and Sara. The island setting, as in A Million Aunties, is a perfect encapsulation; community builds quickly. A pair of siblings, a roommate, a romance: the connections between these characters are clear. Not cozy, however. “You’re on an island that will never change. You’re on an island with no way out. You’re on an island from which you can’t escape. You’re on the completely wrong island. Your way of thinking is wrong.” The sense of insularity is almost overwhelming in some voices. And the circularity in one voice in particular: “Oh, troublemaker weekend. I’m ready. Oh, delightful weekend. I’m partying again. Oh, eternal weekend. Repetitive weekend. Walking in partying circles. Ready to go again.” Originally published in 2014 in Greenlandic, the author felt compelled to depict queer culture, as she had not seen herself represented in literature of her homeland before. Later she translated her own work into Danish. One character’s exploration of sexuality writes so pointedly that I would have felt it more believable in a diary-format, but I’m sure many young readers would find it reassuring to see core concepts of identity discussed in bold and frank terms, so perhaps content is more significant than credibility in this respect.

Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North (2021) landed on my stack because of an impressive NYT review and then it landed on the Booker Prize longlist. Krishan’s voice is mesmerizing and readers are gradually immersed in his thoughts and perspective. He is reflecting on his changing proximity to the conflict in northeast Sri Lanka and an early reference to “the slow accumulation of time” as he moves between spaces warns readers that this narrative is going to accumulate slowly too. He also refers to and recounts other storytellers’ narratives, including classics assigned in school, like Periya Purānam; this story-within-a-story questions the value of what we imagine, which reminds readers, yet again, of how our interior lives impact our external reality. Krishan struggles to locate himself in reference to war and civil unrest, and to comprehend the loss of a single life in the broader context of a nation in which war has resulted in countless deaths. “Accidents happened everywhere, of course, but these accidents had to have been more than just bad luck, for how could such hardy people, people who’d gone through so much and still come out alive, allow themselves to die so easily now and with such docility?” Much of my time “spent dwelling in this site had been painful rather than joyful” but Arudpragasam balances the specific and the universal delicately. But just as he struggles to make sense of contradictions about the war in his homeland, he also struggles to make sense of a romantic relationship—that’s what secured my interest, although the passages I most admired were about freedom and mortality.

What island story would you recommend? Whether a favourite or a recent discovery?