Tense, thought-provoking, and timely, this audiobook is a must-listen. Narrator Ben Onwukwe pulls listeners in immediately with the story of Samuel, a man who lives alone on an unnamed island off the coast of Africa. His solitary existence is simple, but he is witness to the violence around him as the bodies of refugees wash up on his island and he buries them. One day, a stranger washes up still breathing, and his story unfolds as Samuel takes care of him. The tale is dark and heartbreaking but is also important to hear in order to understand the life-changing consequences of dispossession, survival, and hope. Onwukwe captures the tragedy of this story, which listeners will still be thinking about long after it ends. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
An Island
Narrated by Ben Onwukwe
Karen JenningsUnabridged — 5 hours, 25 minutes
An Island
Narrated by Ben Onwukwe
Karen JenningsUnabridged — 5 hours, 25 minutes
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Overview
“An Island by Karen Jennings is quite simply a revelation-a ferocious, swift chess game of a novel.”-Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vulture
Samuel has lived alone on an island off the coast of an unnamed African country for more than two decades. He tends to his garden, his lighthouse, and his chickens, content with a solitary life. Routinely, the nameless bodies of refugees wash ashore, but Samuel-who understands that the government only values certain lives, certain deaths-always buries them himself.
One day, though, he finds that one of these bodies is still breathing. As he nurses the stranger back to life, Samuel-feeling strangely threatened-is soon swept up in memories of his former life as a political prisoner on the mainland. This was a life that saw his country exploited under colonial rule, followed by a period of revolution and a brief, hard-won independence-only for the cycle of suffering to continue under a cruel dictator. And he can't help but recall his own shameful role in that history. In this stranger's presence, he begins to consider, as he did in his youth: What does it mean to own land, or to belong to it? And what does it cost to have, and lose, a home?
A timeless and gripping portrait of regret, terror, and the extraordinary stakes of companionship, An Island is a story as page-turning as it is profound.
Editorial Reviews
06/06/2022
South African writer Jennings’s unsettling U.S. debut explores a lighthouse keeper’s legacy of terror and tragedy. Samuel lives a quiet and isolated life on an island off the coast of an unnamed African country. Though he’s regularly visited by a supply boat, he has little contact with the outside world. His life is hard: he breaks rocks to maintain the sea wall and tends a small vegetable garden and a few chickens. He also buries the bodies of refugees who sometimes wash ashore. One morning he discovers a man washed up on the beach who is still breathing. He hides the stranger in his cottage when the supply boat comes, and soon the refugee’s presence triggers Samuel’s painful memories of torture as a political prisoner, and he grows more and more paranoid, convinced the man intends to displace him. With shifts to Samuel’s horrific past, Jennings shows his suffering and the compounded losses of family and country. Though some readers are sure to be upset by the shocking ending, Jennings succeeds at revealing what made her protagonist’s heart so dark, and his path to redemption so twisted. There’s little hope to be found here, but the author harnesses an undeniable power with this unflinching gaze into the abyss. Agent: Cecile Barendsma, Cecile B Literary Agency. (May)
Beautifully and sparingly constructed . . . In Jennings’s hands, this antihero’s enmeshment in his own failures has a textured credibility that’s hard to look away from. . . . No plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully, whose strength lies in its deliberate pacing and sharp dispensation of detail. Samuel is as real as a shaking hand.”—Lydia Millet, The New York Times
“A probing look at the roots of inhumanity and how the past can poison our compassion.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“An Island by Karen Jennings, is quite simply a revelation—a ferocious, swift chess game of a novel that urgently asks us: What will we be held responsible for in the end? This is a story of hauntings, of the unraveling of secrets and the self, and I couldn’t put it down.”—Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth
“Centuries of colonialism, post-colonialism, refugee crises, political upheavals: Rare is the author who can start with such complex material and relentlessly pare it back to its essentials, as Karen Jennings does. Beginning with the arrival of a stranger on Samuel’s island, and then over the course of four tense days, we feel the weight of each decision he makes, as well as the unease, the paranoia, the ever-present threat of violence. Humble may the characters be, and rocky and windswept their island, but even here, in such unseen places, are terrible battles played out. Honest and unflinching.”—Claire Adam, author of Golden Child
“Through carefully crafted prose and keen political observations, Karen Jennings’s An Island captures history and its consequences in a narrative of quiet violence, displacement, and isolation. This compact book carries the punch of a much larger work, and it does what a good book should: It compels the reader to read on and on until the end, and then to restart once more.”—Rémy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One
“Allegorical and yet profoundly concrete, An Island is an insightful meditation on the illusion of isolation and the possibility of redemption, gracefully told and terrifically moving.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“Jennings adroitly weaves Samuel’s painful past into a disquieting present and through her characters captures universal human truths.”—Booklist
Tense, thought-provoking, and timely, this audiobook is a must-listen. Narrator Ben Onwukwe pulls listeners in immediately with the story of Samuel, a man who lives alone on an unnamed island off the coast of Africa. His solitary existence is simple, but he is witness to the violence around him as the bodies of refugees wash up on his island and he buries them. One day, a stranger washes up still breathing, and his story unfolds as Samuel takes care of him. The tale is dark and heartbreaking but is also important to hear in order to understand the life-changing consequences of dispossession, survival, and hope. Onwukwe captures the tragedy of this story, which listeners will still be thinking about long after it ends. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2022-04-13
A lonely lighthouse keeper encounters a refugee and a host of uncomfortable memories.
At 70, Samuel has grown used to the occasional body of a drowning victim washing ashore, interrupting his existence as the sole occupant of an island off the coast of Africa. The latest arrival, however, is breathing, which brings both comfort and fear. Comfort because the stranger relieves Samuel’s extreme isolation; author Jennings slowly reveals that he spent 23 years in prison under a dictatorship and has been living on the island for more than two decades since. Fear, because the refugee speaks a different language, and though he seems docile, Samuel’s memories of cruelty and violence have reemerged, prompting an intensifying paranoia. In flashbacks, Samuel recalls how his (unnamed) home country escaped colonization only to lapse into a dictatorship and how the turmoil divided his family and brought him into the orbit of activists—and, eventually, prison. In deliberately plainspoken prose, Jennings makes a potent allegory out of Samuel’s relationship with the stranger. Who owns the territory Samuel is on? What does he owe a stranger arriving on it? Where’s the line between an urge to protect and a deranged fear of invasion? (The island itself is a craggy symbol of human nature. As one man told Samuel, “It’s no good trying to tame the island to your will. It will do as it wants.”) Jennings handles these questions supplely, rooting them in Samuel’s character, which deepens as this brief novel goes on. We learn, in time, about his childhood in poverty and a streak of cowardice that’s led to multiple poor decisions. The stormy mood Jennings conjures throughout the novel keeps Samuel’s decision regarding the stranger intriguingly uncertain until the final pages.
A stark, efficient, and compelling revision of Robinson Crusoe.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176195521 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
It was the first time that an oil drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years—ragged shirts, bits of rope, cracked lids from plastic lunch boxes, braids of synthetic material made to resemble hair. There had been bodies, too, as there was today. The length of it stretched out beside the drum, one hand reaching forward as though to indicate that they had made the journey together and did not now wish to be parted.
Samuel saw the drum first, through one of the small windows as he made his way down the inside of the lighthouse tower that morning. He had to walk with care. The stone steps were ancient, worn smooth, their valleyed centers ready to trip him up. He had inserted metal handholds into those places where the cement had allowed, but the rest of the descent was done with arms outstretched, fingers brushing the rough sides in support.
The drum was plastic, the blue of workers’ overalls, and remained in sight, bobbing in the flow, during his hastening to the shore. The body he saw only once he arrived. He sidestepped it, walking a tight circle around the drum. It was fat as a president, without any visible cracks or punctures.
He lifted it carefully. It was empty; the seal had held. Yet despite being light, the thing was unwieldy. It would not be possible with his gnarled hands to grip that smooth surface and carry it across the jagged pebbles, over the boulders, and then up along the sandy track, through scrub and grasses, to the headland where the cottage sat alongside the tower. Perhaps if he fetched a rope and tied the drum to his back, he could avoid using the ancient wooden barrow with its wheel that splintered and caught on the craggy beach, often overturning as a result of its own weight.
Yes, carrying the drum on his back would be the best option. Afterward, in the yard, he would hunt out the old hacksaw that lived among sacking and rotting planks. He would rub the rust from the blade, sharpen it as best he could, and saw the top off the drum, then place it in an outside corner of the cottage where the guttering overflowed, so that it could catch rainwater for use in his vegetable garden.
Samuel let the drum fall. It lurched on the uneven surface, thudding against the arm of the corpse. He had forgotten about that. He sighed. All day it would take him to dispose of the body. All day. First moving it, then the burial, which was impossible anyway on the rocky island with its thin layer of sand. The only option was to cover it with stones, as he had done with others in the past. Yet it was such a large body. Not in breadth, but in its length. Twice as long as the drum, as though the swell and ebb of the sea had mangled it into this unnatural, elongated form.
The arms were strong, disproportionate to the naked torso’s knuckled spine and sharp ribs. Small, fine black curls formed patches on each shoulder blade, and more colored the base of the back where it met his gray denim shorts. The same curls, small, too small for a man of his size, grew on his legs and toes, across his forearms and between the joins of his fingers. They unsettled Samuel. They were the hairs of a newborn animal or of a baby who had stayed too long in the womb. What had the sea birthed here on these stones?
Already, as the midmorning sun was rising, the curls were silvering with salt crystals. His hair, too, was gray where sand had settled in it. Grains adhered to the only portion of the man’s face that was visible—part of his forehead, a closed eye. The rest of the face was pressed into his shoulder.
Samuel tutted. That would have to wait. First he would tend to the drum, then next morning, if the body hadn’t drifted back into the sea, he would have to break some of the island’s rocks, creating enough pieces to cover it.
There had been thirty-two of these washed-up corpses during the twenty-three years that he had been lighthouse keeper. All thirty-two nameless, unclaimed. In the beginning, when the government was new, crisp with promises, when all was still chaos, and the dead and missing of a quarter of a century under dictatorial rule were being sought, Samuel had reported the bodies. The first time officials had come out, with clipboards and a dozen body bags, combing the island for shallow graves, for remains lodged between boulders, for bones and teeth that had become part of the gravelly sand.
“You understand,” the woman in charge had said, as she looked down at a scuff mark on her patent-leather heels, “we have made promises. We must find all those who suffered under the Dictator so that we can move forward, nationally. In a field outside the capital, my colleagues found a grave of at least fifty bodies. Another colleague discovered the remains of seven people who had been hanged from trees in the forest. They were still hanging, you understand, all this time later. Who knows how many we will find here? I am certain it will be many. This is an ideal dumping ground.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh yes, just look around.” She waved at the view. “No one for miles. No one to see or hear or do anything at all.” She leaned closer, lowered her voice. “They say there’s been some talk that he had secret camps, like concentration camps, where he sent dissenters to die. Of course, we don’t know yet if it is absolutely true. We haven’t found evidence of that, but this could well have been such a place, don’t you think? Isn’t this a place where you would send someone to die?”
Samuel did not reply, and the woman had already turned from him, was calling to a member of her team, tapping her watch. “Keep looking,” she said after the man had shaken his head. She faced Samuel again and said, “Once we’ve found the bodies, that’s the time when the healing will begin, for the nation, for us all. We can’t heal until then. We need the bodies.”
When the crew returned one by one, empty-handed, with only the washed-up corpse to show for a day’s work, she rushed to the boat, her departure abrupt, without the courtesy of a goodbye. Samuel did not hear from her, nor from her department. He did not know what happened to the dead man, or who he might have been.
Months later, perhaps a year, he found three small bodies washed up side by side. A young boy, a girl, a baby in a blanket. In those days, the lighthouse’s radio still worked and he’d contacted the shore to report. The woman called him back, her voice clipped by the static.
“What color are they?”
“What?”
“What color are they? The bodies. What color?”
He was silent.
“What I am asking is, are they darker than us—their skin—that is what I want to know. Are they darker than you or me?”
“I think so.”
“And their faces? Are they longer? What are their cheekbones like?”
“I don’t know. They’re children. They look like children.”
“Listen, we’re busy people. We have real crimes to deal with. Actual atrocities, you understand. We cannot come out to the island every time another country’s refugees flee and drown. It’s not our problem.”
“What must I do with them then?”
“Do what you like. We don’t want them.”
By then he had already started his vegetable garden beside the cottage, had used his wages to import soil from the mainland, had ordered seeds and clippings. And to protect all of that new growth, he had begun to fashion a dry-stone wall around it. He gathered all the brick-sized stones of the island, fitting them together one on top of the other, until they were high enough, stretched far enough to form a barrier. After that he ordered a sledgehammer and broke apart the many rocks and boulders that composed the coastline, using the rubble in his construction. Slowly the island began to change shape. Had a helicopter been in the habit of flying over, its pilot would note the widening of the small bays, the curves where serrated edges had once been.
Samuel continued with the wall along the perimeter of the island until everything was encircled. It was into this outer wall that he began to introduce the bodies. Most times before burying them, Samuel went through their pockets for objects of identification, but there had never been anything of significance. Not beyond an old man’s fist, lumpen with a wad of foreign money squeezed to pulp in his grip. Samuel had buried him with it. He selected spots for the corpses in those sections of the wall that were farthest from the cottage, where the smell of their decay would not reach him. Still, they attracted gulls that for weeks hovered and cawed around the wall, trying to peck their way in. With time he learned to make these parts sturdier, so that they bulged a little around their contents. Even so, sometimes the gulls managed to break through and pick at the body inside. In those places where corpses were left to disintegrate unaided, the stones often collapsed.
Samuel half nudged, half kicked the body where it lay beside the drum. The impact caused the arm to shift, the head to roll from its position and reveal the face. Both eyes opened briefly. The throat growled and fingers on the extended hand twitched, tapping a pebble beneath them.
Samuel shuffled backward. “Hello,” he said softly. Then, “Hello.”
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