The team at Kesgrave Library share some of their favourite island reads! Browse our staff recommendations and pick up a copy from your local library.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations or explore more of the National Year of Reading campaign.
The Lost Lights of St Kilda
Elisabeth Gifford
Chrissie Gillies comes from the last ever community to live on the beautiful, isolated Scottish island of St Kilda. Evacuated in 1930, she will never forget her life there, nor the man she loved and lost who visited one fateful summer a few years before.
Fred Lawson has been captured, beaten and imprisoned in Nazi-controlled France. Making a desperate escape across occupied territory, one thought sustains him: find Chrissie, the woman he should never have left behind on that desolate, glorious isle.
The Last Summer
Karen Swan
Eighteen year old Effie Gillies has lived all her life on St Kilda; she’s the best climber on the island, as skilled and brave as any of the men. But in matters of the heart, she’s an innocent, and when Lord Sholto, heir to the Earl of Dumfries, visits, the attraction between them is instant.
For one glorious week she guides the handsome young visitor around the isle, falling in love for the first time – until a storm hits and her world falls apart.
Three months later, St Kilda falls silent as the islanders are evacuated for a better life on the mainland. With her friends and family scattered, Effie is surprised to be offered a position working on the Earl’s estate, but seeing Sholto in polite society isn’t the reunion she’d hoped for.
And when a body is discovered on the abandoned isle a few days later, she wonders if this is really a new beginning – or just an ending she can’t escape.
Raven Black
Ann Cleeves
It is a cold January morning and Shetland lies buried beneath a deep layer of snow. Trudging home, Fran Hunter’s eye is drawn to a vivid splash of colour on the white ground, ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbour Catherine Ross. As Fran opens her mouth to scream, the ravens continue their deadly dance…
The locals on the quiet island stubbornly focus their gaze on one man – loner and simpleton Magnus Tait. But when police insist on opening out the investigation a veil of suspicion and fear is thrown over the entire community.
For the first time in years, Catherine’s neighbours nervously lock their doors, whilst a killer lives on in their midst.
The Glassmaker
Tracy Chevalier
Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle.
Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her?
Tidelands
Philippa Gregory
Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament.
Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband.
Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life.
The Wolf Tree
Laura McCluskey
On a small island off the coast of Scotland, an isolated community is grieving. Eighteen-year-old Alan Ferguson was found at the foot of the lighthouse – an apparent suicide.
DIs Georgina Lennox and Richard Stewart are sent to investigate. But a raging storm keeps them trapped on the island for four days. And the locals don’t take kindly to mainlanders. As George and Ritchie question the island’s inhabitants, they discover a village filled with superstition and shrouded in secrets.
But someone wants those secrets to stay buried. At any cost.
The Wartime Book Club
Kate Thompson
Jersey, 1943. When the German Army invades the tranquil island, librarian Grace La Motée is determined to keep her services running.
Ordered to destroy books which threaten the Nazi regime, she refuses, instead hiding them away and fighting back by forming a book club: a lifeline to help islanders escape the terror of war, one chapter at a time.
But soon Grace’s quiet acts of bravery become even more perilous. She’s harbouring dangerous secrets – ones that put her life in danger – and when tensions turn to violence, she is forced to face the true, terrible cost of resistance.
Stranded
Sarah Goodwin
When eight people arrive on the beautiful but remote Buidseach Island, they are ready for the challenge of a lifetime: to live alone for one year.
18 months later, a woman is found in an isolated fishing village. She’s desperate to explain what happened to her: how the group fractured and friends became enemies; how they did what they must to survive until the boat came to collect them; how things turned deadly when the boat didn’t come.
But first Maddy must come to terms with the devastating secret that left them stranded, and her own role in the events that saw eight arrive and only three leave.
The Light Between Oceans
M. L. Stedman
After experiencing the horrors of The Western Front, Tom moves to Janus Island to work as a lighthouse keeper. He hopes that life on the remote island with his wife Izzy will bring him peace following the war.
The two of them are happy together, although frustrations arise the longer they try for a child that never comes.
But then, one day, a boat washes up on the shore of their little island. In it, lies a dead man – and a crying baby.
Faced with an impossible decision, Tom and Izzy do what they think is right and follow their hearts. What happens next will break yours.
The Island
Victoria Hislop
This was not the start of a short trip to deliver supplies. It was the beginning of a one-way journey to start a new life. Life on a leper colony. Life on Spinalonga.
Fifty years later, making a life-changing journey of her own, Alexis Fielding feels the pull of the abandoned island. A distant shadow off the coast of Crete, she knows it holds the secrets of her mother’s past, buried for so long but surely not forgotten…