Island of Wings - Softcover

Karin Altenberg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857382322 ISBN 13: 9780857382320

Publisher: Quercus Publishing Plc, 2011

Synopsis

On the ten-hour sailing west from the Hebrides to the islands of St Kilda, everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil MacKenzie. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders and Lizzie, his new wife, is pregnant with their first child. Neil's journey is evangelical: a testing and strengthening of his own faith against the old pagan ways of the St Kildans, but it is also a passage to atonement. For Lizzie - bright, beautiful and devoted - this is an adventure, a voyage into the unknown. She is sure only of her loyalty and love for her husband, but everything that happens from now on will challenge all her certainties.

As the two adjust to life on an exposed archipelago on the edge of civilization, where the natives live in squalor and subsist on a diet of seabirds, and babies perish mysteriously in their first week, their marriage - and their sanity - is threatened. Is Lizzie a willful temptress drawing him away from his faith? Is Neil's zealous Christianity unhinging into madness? And who, or what, is haunting the moors and cliff-tops?

Exquisitely written and profoundly moving, Island of Wings is more than just an account of a marriage in peril - it is also a richly imagined novel about two people struggling to keep their love, and their family, alive in a place of terrible hardship and tumultuous beauty.

About this title

Review:

'Island of Wings captures a world that disappears in the act of description, and the love, so inescapable and elusive, of the outsiders who try to tame it. With scrupulous attention to place, history and the natural world, it tells a story washed by a clean and lovely kind of sorrow' Anne Enright.

'A beautiful story of love and loss among the dark sea cliffs of St Kilda ... precise, subtle, spiritually alive' Andrew O'Hagan. --Reviews.

About the Author:

Born and brought up in southern Sweden, Karin Altenberg moved to Britain to study in 1996. She holds a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Reading. Her thesis was published in 2001 and won the Nordenstedska Foundation Award. She is currently senior advisor to the Swedish National Heritage Board and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Island of Wings is her first novel and she is currently working on her second.

About this edition

• Publisher: Quercus Publishing Plc
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0857382322
• ISBN 13: 9780857382320
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304