A lush work of suspense viewed through the refracted lens of childhood memory. At the age of eleven, Helen leaves her home in Paris to spend the summer with her parents and her older sister Lea on a Mediterranean island--an island full of beauty, but marred by a string of mysterious tragedies. Ingenuous and shy, yet sharply observant, Helen watches as tension escalates in this summer community; her dignified expatriate parents, bearing up under a struggling marriage; the provocative and rebellious Lea: Mr. Peters, the eccentric American painter next door; the nurturing housekeeper Adriana; and the family’s mysterious houseguests, the Ashtons, who arrive with well-worn suitcases from a life of exotic nomadism. But when one invasive act draws Helen from the sidelines into the center of the drama, her continued silence takes on tragic implications that culminate in her sister’s disappearance. Uncoiling with foreboding and inevitability, The Forgotten Island is a mesmerizing novel driven by the redemptive power of storytelling.
Reviews
- Elle Magazine[+]"The Forgotten Island, like her mesmerizing first novel, Angels in the Morning, pulses with dark undercurrents of familial love and betrayal, sisterly mysteries and rites, louche neighbors and secretive houseguests—here assembled in plenary summer on a lush island off the coast of the Italian coast, where the sisters’ youthful games set the stage for potent dangers and unspeakable deeds.
- NYU Alumni Magazine[+]"Troyan’s novels are impressionistic, lyrical and compulsively readable."
- Antonya Nelson, author of Talking in Bed and Female Trouble[+]"Troyan has a special gift for inhabiting her young protagonist so thoroughly as to transport the reader back to the sensual, fraught, myopic realm of childhood. The Forgotten Island is a dream landscape, incantatory, charmed, replete with the gorgeous terrors of what dreams reveal and the haunting way they last.”
- Jean Thompson, author of City Boy and Who Do You Love?[+]"The Forgotten Island is a beautifully rendered story of paradise lost, of everyday evil and of childhood betrayed. Sasha Troyan is a fearless and heartbreaking writer."
- Publishers Weekly[+]"Lush, languid…Troyan weaves loving, sensual descriptions of place and characters and a muted sense of foreboding."