Enchanted Islands

by Allison Amend

Overview

Born to immigrant parents in Minnesota just before the turn of the century, Frances Frankowski grew up coveting the life of her best friend, Rosalie Mendel. And yet, decades later, when the women reconnect in San Francisco, their lives have diverged. Rosalie is a housewife and mother, while Frances works for the Office of Naval Intelligence and has just been given a top-secret assignment: marry handsome spy Ainslie Conway and move to the Galápagos Islands to investigate the Germans living there in the build-up to World War II.

Amid active volcanoes, forbidding wildlife and flora, and unfriendly neighbors, Ainslie and Frances carve out a life for themselves. But the secrets they harbor—from their friends, from their enemies, and even from each other—may be their undoing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804172042
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Allison Amend, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is the author of the novels A Nearly Perfect Copy and Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. She is also the author of the Independent Publisher's Award-winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love. She lives in New York City where she teaches creative writing.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Enchanted Islands"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Allison Amend.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

1. Despite everything that happens between them, why do you think Frances and Rosalie’s friendship lasts? What makes for a lifelong friendship? Do you have a Rosalie in your life?

2. Frances is alone for much of the novel. In what way does being an unmarried woman around the turn of the last century affect her choices and opportunities?

3. Do you think Frances should have known why Ainslie is so distant? Should Ainslie have told her sooner?

4. So much of Frances’ life on Floreana is spent pretending and keeping secrets. Why is she so conflicted about th is?

5. What draws Frances and Elke together? What do they have in common? Would they be friends anywhere else?

6. Frances and Rosalie have very different responses to their faith as they age. Why does Rosalie embrace her heritage while Frances leaves it behind?

7. Though Frances and Ainslie are not lovers in the traditional sense, they care for each other and need each other. Does that give love a different dimension or definition? Should Frances have stayed in her marriage? Why or why not?

8. How is life different for Frances after coming back from the islands?

9. Do you think Josef is good for Frances? Why or why not?

10. Why does Frances feel the need to tell her story at the end of her life?

Editorial Reviews

Enchanted Islands is a many faceted jewel. It’s a spy thriller, a survivalist memoir, and a portrait of a marriage. . . . Fabulous…. Will carry you away.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“An endearing chronicle of female friendship.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
 
“A vivid picture of a woman surviving in a place where friends and enemies alike can both enthrall and harm. The result is beautiful, terrifying, and haunting, a deeply moving lovechild between Elena Ferrante and John Le Carré.” —Chicago Review of Books
 
“Steeped in the wondrous history of the Galápagos and bursting with the magic of pure invention. An elegant stylist and a masterful chronicler of the most hidden and luminous corners of the human experience, Amend is a spectacular talent.” —Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me

“A fascinating rumination on identity, friendship and love . . . [Amend] vividly evokes Duluth’s bleakness, Chicago’s sparkling bustle, rural Nebraska’s quietude and San Francisco’s sophistication. Most enticing of all is the otherworldliness of the Galápagos.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Dazzling.” —Travel + Leisure
 
“Amend’s novel manages to encompass a woman’s life, the story of a marriage, a tense standoff between Allied and Axis operatives, and a sensitive examination of women’s friendship.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Allison Amend is a wonderful writer—generous and psychologically astute—and Enchanted Islands is both a sweeping epic and a moving exploration of the intricacies of friendship. This is a beautiful novel that will stay with me for a long time.” —Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
 
“Absorbing. . . . Amend’s spirited rendition of [Frances Conway’s] life reads less like a memoir and more like Jane Austen. It has acute interpersonal observations and subjective flights of fancy.” —BookPage
 
“In Enchanted Islands, Allison Amend distills the entire life of Frances Conway—one of, if not the, most fully realized characters I’ve encountered in the last decade—into a captivating narrative. . . . Brilliant.” —Jill Alexander Essbaum, New York Times bestselling author of Hausfrau
 
“Mesmerizing and captivating. . . . The kind of book that will make you want to renew your passport” —Bustle
 
“Secrets, lies, and spies on a faraway island. . . . Appealing characters and vivid local color make for an entertaining read.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“In this shrewdly textured yet directly told tale of an unorthodox life, Amend fills Franny’s worlds of poverty, intrigue, and indignant old age with rewarding vibrancy and touching vulnerability.” —Booklist


“A taut, powerful tale of human relationships and the sacrifices people make to maintain their balance.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“In this compulsively readable novel, exotic locales and international espionage bend before the greatest intrigue of all: the life of a captivating mind. . . . Enchanted Islands is as moving as it is impossible to put down.” —Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

From the Publisher

…Allison Amend's Enchanted Islands isn't concerned with packing its protagonist off to face exotic hardships and emerge a freshly insightful woman. This isn't yet another novel about a woman "finding herself" in the wild; it's an endearing chronicle of female friendship and evolution in the early 20th century…Amend displays her talent for making solitary humans the most alluring animals among blue-footed boobies, great frigatebirds and the rest of Darwin's magnificent crew. On an island bursting with nature's most remarkable creatures, humanity's depthless capacity for loneliness crows most keenly.

The New York Times Book Review - Hillary Kelly

03/28/2016
In Amend’s mesmerizing third novel, Frances Conway struggles through the lies of her life and marriage, where “the circles of deception were endless.” Frances’s childhood and adolescence are shaped by her friendship with Rosalie, but their close relationship is destroyed by a stunning betrayal. Years later in the 1930s, Frances is a 50-year-old secretary for the U.S. Navy in San Francisco. Bored and restless, Frances is persuaded to join in a marriage of convenience with a naval officer 11 years her junior, as a cover for an obscure intelligence operation on the Galapagos Islands just prior to World War II. Her new husband, Ainsley, is handsome and charming, but with disturbing secrets of his own. Their marriage is odd—they may be married, but they are not husband and wife. Their life on the Galapagos Islands is spartan, consisting of hard work in a harsh, beautiful environment, keeping an eye on the few Germans living there. Always watchful and wary, they make it through the war, but Ainsley’s secrets take a darker, more sinister turn. This is a taut, powerful tale of human relationships and the sacrifices people make to maintain their balance. (May)

Publishers Weekly

11/15/2016
Drawing on the memoir of Frances Conway, this fascinating and well-written fictionalized account follows the daughter of Jewish immigrants as she runs away as a teenager from Minnesota to Chicago and then on to Nebraska and San Francisco where she eventually lands a secretarial job working for Navy intelligence. There she marries an undercover officer and accompanies him on a secret mission to the Galápagos Islands to spy on the Germans at the brink of World War II. Readers will be tempted to read Conway's actual memoir to learn more about this intriguing couple, the enchanted setting, and extraordinary time.Read-Alikes Jillian Cantor's The Hours Count, Andrew Gross's The One Man, and Joseph Kanon's Leaving Berlin.

Library Journal

2016-03-03
Secrets, lies, and spies on a faraway island. The real-life Frances and Ainslie Conway spent years before, during, and after World War II on the Galápagos Islands, recording their unusual adventure in two memoirs that have inspired Amend's (A Nearly Perfect Copy, 2013, etc.) pleasurable new novel. Her fictional Frances grows up in a Jewish immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Duluth, with a best friend, Rosalie, who is being sexually exploited and parents too poor even to let her finish high school. The two girls run away when they are 15, but their paths soon diverge: Rosalie eventually marries a rich man and becomes a socialite; Frances, after putting herself through college, ends up as a secretary in San Francisco, working for Navy Intelligence. One day, her boss presents her with "a strange proposition." It seems that one Ainslie Conway, a military man who "does some shadow work" for the Navy, is being assigned to "a rather remote post, and part of his cover," he tells Frances, "requires that he arrive with a wife." No explanation is provided for this requirement, but soon Frances, at 50, is married to the handsome, charming Ainslie, 11 years her junior. Although he sometimes stays out all night, although Frances notices lingering looks between him and other men, and although Ainslie takes three months to consummate their union, she fails to guess that he's gay until, on the island, she catches him kissing a man. "You'll wonder how I could have been so blind," she admits. But she realizes, too, that her love for him is "deeper than mere facts." On the island, the Conways are supposed to look out for German spies, but Amend portrays espionage as less challenging than the arduous struggles of daily life. Despite some improbable plot twists, appealing characters and vivid local color make for an entertaining read.

Kirkus Reviews