Desolation Island
Adolfo García Ortega author Peter Bush translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:4th Oct '12
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A modern classic: a seafaring tale spanning four centuries of adventure.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, a ship heads for Punta Arenas at Chile's southern tip.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, a ship heads for Punta Arenas at Chile's southern tip. On board is Oliver Griffin, who is fascinated by the island and spends his life drawing intricate maps of it. He is on an unusual quest, inspired by a photograph of his grandparents embracing a strange automaton that now lives in the Punta Arenas museum.
This fearsome metal warrior is a sixteenth-century robot from a proposed mechanical army, commissioned to guard the straight against the English. It was discovered on the island by a grieving woman scouring the archipelago for the bodies of her shipwrecked husband and son, and is now the curious axis around which countless stories spin, surrounded by the terrible yet mesmerizing sea...
An adventure story...extravagantly enthralling -- Michael Kerrigan * Times Literary Supplement *
It's a rich, complicated, eccentric gumbo of a book... An epic tale of the restless journeys of the mind * Metro *
Ortega's energy and relentless inventiveness succeed in creating a seamless and utterly compelling blend of the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. A Bolaño-like encyclopaedia...the literary equivalent of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities... One of the most original novels to have appeared in Spain in recent years, Desolation Island is ultimately a magnificent tale of travel * Literary Review *
Desolation Island has all the characteristics of a postmodern classic...has all the elements of the classic adventure novel, from The Odyssey to Moby Dick * El País *
An ambitious and successful novel that confronts the reader with important questions: love, death, identity, evil... * El Periodico *
Rarely has fiction been so truthful. Rarely has reading been so vital and so absorbing * La Vanguardia *
A wonderful novel... We are between Odysseus' journey, the kernel of the epic novel, and Melville's Moby Dick... This novel aims to go to the heart of literature, to take up once more the almost extinguished call of ancient and contemporary heroes * ABC *
A good old-fashioned mariner’s adventure – though bursting with postmodern strangeness -- Holly Kyte * Sunday Telegraph *
ISBN: 9780099516934
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 24mm
Weight: 277g
400 pages