Guest post written by Floreana author Midge Raymond
Midge Raymond is the author of My Last Continent, the short-story collection Forgetting English, and, with coauthor John Yunker, the mystery novel Devils Island. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. Midge has taught at Boston University, Boston’s GrubStreet Writers, Seattle’s Hugo House, and San Diego Writers, Ink. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she is co-founder of the boutique publisher Ashland Creek Press.
About Floreana: On the Galápagos Islands, the lives of two women―a century apart―converge in the most startling ways in a historical novel of desperate love, secrets, and deception by the author of My Last Continent.
Being on a faraway island can seem like paradise—until it isn’t.
Often in real life (and always in literature) things can go sideways for those who find themselves on a remote island, far removed from their regularly scheduled lives and from society’s expectations. My novel, Floreana, set on the isolated Galápagos island of the same name, is narrated by two women separated by 100 years, whose stories show how being so far away can feel like freedom while often turning out to be anything but.
Both characters—one a Berlin hausfrau who flees to Floreana with her lover, the other a penguin researcher back in the field after a decade away—hope to find an escape on Floreana, only to end up facing the very challenges they’d hoped to outrun: questions about life, love, who they really are, and what their future holds. Whether fleeing to a desert island to start a new life or to save an endangered species, paradise is hard work—especially if you’re carrying your secrets with you.
And in fiction, islands aren’t merely settings but can be characters as well. The island of Floreana is haunting and capricious, seeing would-be settlers come and go while constantly plunging inhabitants into drought, then turning around and providing a tantalizing bounty of tropical fruits and veggies. And, of course, islands are moody; dramatic weather nearly always comes with the territory.
What I love about books set in remote place is that characters are forced to come to terms with themselves—usually when they’re looking to avoid doing just that. As the saying goes, “No matter where you go, there you are.” These 7 books feature tales of how the effects of isolation can lead humans to act in unexpected ways, for better or worse, as well as how it can help them discover who they truly are.
The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman
In Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, a young woman flees her Florida home after being sexually harassed at her job for the last time and travels to the island of St. Thomas, where she comes across a man-made sluice leading into a lagoon that holds four wild dolphins. Cora, who is hard of hearing above water, hears very well underwater, and she gets into the water with the dolphins in order to hear them better. The resident scientists, who actually know very little about the dolphins, hire her immediately, and she connects with the animals in ways no one has before, learning about the dolphins, herself, and her place in the world. Inspired by a true story about dolphin research in St. Thomas in the 1960s, this novel portrays sexism, science, and animal intelligence in a beautiful tribute to the natural world.
Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith
In Alexis M. Smith’s novel Marrow Island, a devastating earthquake and the oil refinery accident that follows leave the island uninhabitable—or so the inhabitants believe. As it turns out, decades later there is a thriving community of “colonists” living there—but not all is as it appears. Former islander Lucie Bowen returns to witness an astonishing transformation, and what she finds is both inspiring and devastating. Marrow Island, a book as much about a woman’s attempts to reconnect with her past as it is about the environment, reveals the connections between disasters natural and man-made, between relationships past and present, and how we recover—or do not—from landscapes forever changed.
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galápagos, which will see its fortieth birthday in 2025, still feels relevant as a story about a small group of people who end up stranded on a (fictional) Galápagos island after a global financial meltdown. Told from the perspective of a descendant of the survivors who is looking back one million years later, this novel reveals how much more difficult life was in the 1980s, when our oversized human brains led to society’s downfall. From our arrogance to our ability to deceive to our great capacity for denial, having a big brain was nothing but trouble. With Vonnegut’s signature wit and wisdom, this is a survival story of the fittest.
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman
In this stunning novel set at a lighthouse on an isolated point of land, a grieving couple rescue an infant, adrift at sea with her deceased father, and claim her as their own. Still mourning her miscarriages and stillbirth, Isabel convinces her reluctant husband, Tom, that the baby who washed ashore is meant to be theirs. Living in isolation, they can live their uneasy family dream until they return to the mainland when the child is two—and realize their actions didn’t happen in isolation after all.
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
This twisty psychological thriller begins in the 1950s with two U.S. Marshals visiting the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on the Alcatraz-like Shutter Island, where the hospital was once a military barracks. The Marshals are there to investigate the disappearance of one of the hospital’s patients, but Teddy Daniels has his own agenda, and the story, addled with suspicion about experiments and psychotropic drugs, gets darker and more sinister along the way. A catastrophic hurricane stranding them on the island adds to the tension of the story, which ends with a spectacular twist.
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Being trapped on an island, whether with friends or strangers, makes for a great thriller—like Lucy Foley’s The Guest List. The haunting atmosphere of the secluded Irish setting—a tiny island off the coast, cut off from the mainland, in the midst of a raging storm—makes the location a character in itself, and the bad behavior of the humans keeps the tension rising, especially when one of them turns up dead. The seething jealousies and the luxurious amenities make this a wedding to die for, and it’s pure deadly fun.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Among the most famous of island novels, Lord of the Flies is the poster child for what can go wrong when stranded in total isolation. When seven British schoolboys are stuck on an uninhabited island, order descends into chaos and imagination turns into paranoia—and none of it ends well. This classic novel remains one of the most insightful, if quite terrifying, glimpses into human nature—with the island as the instigator of what we all may be capable of.
