Favorite book of the year so far, and I almost didn’t pick it up! I decided to pop it in my Book of the Month box when I got my yearly BFF free book of the year selection. I have read McConaghy’s Migrations and thought it was impressive, but I didn’t love it. There’s something about stories of being a ‘stranger in a strange land’ that always appeal to me.

From the first pages, as the main character washes ashore and is discovered by the children in this curiously dysfunctional family, I was hooked and the pace did not let up until the bitter end. Try as I might to figure out what really happened to all of the scientists that disappeared from this remote island, I could never have imagined their fate. The twists kept coming, then fell like an avalanche in the last pages and I was blown away and emotionally wrought. This book has it all: excellent prose, vivid sense of place, thoughtful themes (especially on parenthood, patriarchy and environmentalism), complex and fully rendered characters while also being an absolute page-turner. LOVED!

“I close my eyes, drinking it all in, knowing it is a place in time that I will never forget. The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.”