The Islands
Six Fictions
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press
Published:28th Mar '21
Should be back in stock very soon
The first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize
In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides.In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides. Dominated by the tragic loss of a third sister at a young age, their family spirals out of control. We witness three stages of the sisters’ lives, each taking place on an island - in southwest Ireland, southern England, and the Bay of Naples. Beautifully and sparsely written, the stories deeply evoke landscape and character, and are suffused with a keen eye for detail and metaphor.
The Islands is evocative, moving, yet tough-minded, written with marvelous style and authority. After just the first few sentences, we trust absolutely that this writer is in control and knows what he's doing. The narratives move expeditiously, even when they're thick with description, and the characters' voices are distinct and convincing. It was a pleasure to read.
* David Gates, judge *William Wall is a tremendous writer, and The Islands is a beautiful collection. In a noisy age of information, these stories, written with pristine elegance and suffused with a rare beauty, do what fiction does best: they uncover deeply humane, quiet moments that radiate meaning. No one—with the exception of James Joyce and Alistair MacLeod—writes about the way the sea meets the land with the authority and knowingness of Wall. The Islands is an elegant and astonishing sequence of stories.
* David Means *Past praise for William Wall
Wall, who is also a poet, writes prose so charged—at once lyrical and syncopated—that it's as if Cavafy had decided to write about a violent Irish household."
ISBN: 9780822966265
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
144 pages