An Island
Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
$25.49
- Paperback
192 pages
- Release Date
24 August 2021
Summary
Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, a powerful and suspenseful literary novel set on an island off the African coast. While the story takes place across four days, it reveals the echoes of decades of civil war, rebellion and loss.
Samuel is now an old man. For many years he has lived alone on a small island where he is the lighthouse keeper. Until the day when a young refugee washes up on the beach, all but dead. Samuel nurses him back to life but he is unsettled by the intruder. He…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781922458490 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 192245849X |
| Author: | Karen Jennings |
| Publisher: | Text Publishing |
| Imprint: | The Text Publishing Company |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 192 |
| Release Date: | 24 August 2021 |
| Weight: | 259g |
| Dimensions: | 232mm x 153mm x 14mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
‘The far southern extremities of our planet produce remarkable, distilled, and ravaged tales. An Island has to be counted as among the most remarkable of these. Karen Jennings offers a chilling, immersive portrait of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper on a remote island off the African continent. He is a man at the edge of history, until the arrival of a refugee stranger returns him to everything he most needs to forget. A gripping, terrifying and unforgettable story.’ * Elleke Boehmer *
‘An Island concerns itself with lives lived on the margins, through the story of a man who has exiled himself from the known world… a moving, transfixing novel of loss, political upheaval, history, identity, all rendered in majestic and extraordinary prose.’ * Booker Prize Judges *
‘Thoroughly absorbing… a small but powerful book, with the reach of a more capacious work, compounding merciless political critique and allegory rendered in tender prose.’ * Guardian *
‘A disturbing masterpiece.’ * Good Reading *
‘A disturbing masterpiece exposing xenophobia and the plight of modern refugees. Through Samuel’s story [Jennings] exposes human frailties and what drives the need to defend oneself, land and possessions.’ * Good Reading *
‘Everything coheres because of Jennings’s immaculate understanding of craft. Each polished narrative piece perfectly complements the next. This is a novel of contrasts: understated and bold, spare and sweeping, slender and grand.’ * Vulture *
About The Author
Karen Jennings
Karen Jennings is a South African writer. Her novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, and her follow-up novel was longlisted for The Women’s Prize in 2025. She currently lectures at North-West University.
In 2021, she received the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award and won the Africa Region Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition.
Karen founded The Island Prize for unpublished African authors to help them get published globally. Now in its fifth year, the prize has assisted authors from all over the continent.
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