The Island (Hislop)

The Island 
Victoria Hislop, 2005
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061340321


Summary 
The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation's leper colony once was located—a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women.

There's Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully cares for her father, and Anna, a wild child hungry for passion and a life anywhere but Plaka. And finally there's Alexis, Eleni's great-granddaughter, visiting modern-day Greece to unlock her family's past.

A richly enchanting novel of lives and loves unfolding against the backdrop of the Mediterranean during World War II, The Island is an enthralling story of dreams and desires, of secrets desperately hidden, and of leprosy's touch on an unforgettable family. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Bromley, Kent, England, UK
• Raised—Tonbridge, England
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Sissinghurst, England

Victoria Hislop writes travel features for The Sunday Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday, along with celebrity profiles for Woman & Home. She lives in Kent, England, with her husband and their two children. (From the publisher.)

More
Born in Bromley (Kent), Victoria Hislop (nee Hamson) grew up in Tonbridge. She read English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and worked in publishing and as a journalist before becoming an author.

In 1988 she married Private Eye editor Ian Hislop in Oxford. They have two children, Emily Helen and William David, and live in Sissinghurst.

Hislop's first novel, The Island (2005), which the Sunday Express hailed as "the new Captain Corelli's Mandolin" was a Number 1 Bestseller in the UK, selling more than 1 million copies. According to her website, she rejected a Hollywood film offer (worth £300,000) for the novel. Instead, she offered the rights to Mega, a Greek television channel, for a fraction of the fee. Her desire was "to preserve the integrity of the book and to give something back to the Mediterranean island on which it is based."

The Return, her second novel, a sequel set in Spain, has also been a success and was followed by The Thread in 2012.

In 2009, she donated the short story "Aflame in Athens" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project—four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Fire collection. ("More" adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)

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Book Reviews
Passionately engaged with its subject...the author has meticulously researched her fascinating background and medical facts
Sunday Times (London)

Hislop carefully evokes the lives of Cretans between the wars and during German occupation, but most commendable is her compassionate portrayal of the outcasts.
Guardian (UK)

At last—a beach book with a heart.... Meticulous research into Cretan culture...packed with family sagas, doomed love affairs, devastating secrets.... [Hislop] also forces us to reflect on illness, both the nasty, narrow-mindedness of the healthy and the spirit of survival in the so-called "unclean". Her message seems as relevant today as it would have been a century ago.
Observer (UK)

Travel writer Hislop's unwieldy debut novel opens with 25-year-old Alexis leaving Britain for Crete, her mother Sofia's homeland, hoping to ferret out the secrets of Sofia's past and thereby get a handle on her own turbulent life. Sofia's friend Fortini tells Alexis of her grandmother Anna, and great-aunt Maria. Their mother (Alexis's great-grandmother) contracted leprosy in 1939 and went off to a leper colony on the nearby island of Spinalonga, leaving them with their father. Anna snags a wealthy husband, Andreas, but smolders for his renegade cousin, Manoli. When philanderer Manoli chooses Maria, Anna is furious. Conveniently, Maria also contracts leprosy and is exiled, allowing Anna to conduct an affair with Manoli. Meanwhile, Maria feels an attraction to her doctor, who may have similar feelings. Though the plot is satisfyingly twisty, the characters play one note apiece (Anna is prone to dramatic outrages, Maria is humble and kind, and their love interests are jealous and aggressive). Hislop's portrayal of leprosy-those afflicted and the evolving treatment-during the 1940s and 1950s is convincing, but readers may find the narrative's preoccupation with chronicling the minutiae of daily life tedious.
Publishers Weekly

It would be hard to imagine a more cheerless setting for a novel than a leper colony on a remote Greek island, but the community of Spinalonga provides a remarkable backdrop for this affecting, multigenerational saga. At the outset of World War II, when she exhibits the first signs of leprosy, Eleni Petrakis is exiled to Spinalonga, an island off the coast of Crete. Leaving behind her husband and young daughters, Eleni believes her life is over. But the sun-soaked island, with its brightly painted houses and lively, well-run community, turns out to be a comfortable and humane refuge. Life is less kind to the family she had to forsake. While Maria remains a caring daughter to her single parent, sister Anna never recovers from the abandonment and grows into a cold and deceitful woman. In a cruel twist of fate, it is Maria who also falls prey to the disease on the eve of her wedding and who is sentenced to spend her own days on Spinalonga. Bookended by the present-day journey into her past by Anna's grown daughter, this debut novel is a deeply pleasurable read.
Barbara Love - Library Journal

When beloved schoolteacher Eleni is diagnosed with leprosy, she is exiled to the Greek island of Spinalonga. Left behind on Crete are her husband and two beautiful daughters.... [S]uccessful in Britain....[t]here's little to object to in this historical romp. —Marta Segal Block
Booklist

A young Englishwoman discovers her family's secret links to a Cretan leper colony, in an unusually humane saga. A bestseller in the U.K., British author Hislop's debut pays affecting tribute to the victims of leprosy and those who helped them. Alexis's mother Sofia has never discussed her family background, but when Alexis plans a trip to Crete with her decreasingly appealing boyfriend Ed, Sofia gives her an introduction to old family friend, Fortini, in the village of Plaka, across from Spinalonga Island, for years a leper colony, but now deserted. Fortini, with Sofia's permission, begins to narrate the Petrakis family story, starting with Alexis's grandmother Eleni in 1939, a saintly, married schoolteacher who developed leprosy, moved to Spinalonga and died there, leaving behind her husband and two daughters, Anna and Maria. Willful Anna marries rich Andreas but flirts with his sexier cousin Manoli, who falls in love with good-natured Maria. Their wedding plans are shattered when Maria realizes she too is infected with leprosy and must go to the island. Under the treatment of kind Dr. Kyritsis, Maria is given drugs, and eventually she and the other sufferers are healed and the colony is closed. Anna, meanwhile, has had an affair with Manoli and given birth to Sofia. On the night of Maria's return to Plaka, Andreas discovers the affair and shoots Anna. Eventually, Maria marries Kyritsis and they bring up Sofia, not revealing until very late her true parentage. Sofia takes the news badly, moves away and lives a life of shame and guilt for the pain she caused. Now she and Alexis are reunited in Plaka and Ed is given his marching orders. Mediocre fiction is redeemed by considerable empathy in this serious but patchy summer read.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. How does the island of Spinalonga compare to its nearest neighbor, Plaka, in terms of natural resources and amenities?

2. What enables Eleni Petrakis to endure the separation from her family that she faces as an exile on Spinalonga?

3. How is life with leprosy portrayed in The Island? To what extent does it differ from any prior knowledge about the disease that you may have had?

4. How would you compare Anna and Maria's temperaments as young children, and how do their personalities affect their relationship as adults?

5. How does Anna's initial encounter with her husband's cousin, Manoli Vandoulakis, anticipate the nature of their extramarital relationship?

6. In what ways does Fortini Davaras serve as the character who links past, present, and future in the story that unfolds in The Island?

7. How would you characterize Maria's feelings for Dr. Kyritsis? Why is the nature of their relationship something that must be kept secret from the other residents of Spinalonga?

8. Why is Ed resistant to Alexis's need to know more about her family's past, and why does learning the truth about her mother's childhood help Alexis to make decisions regarding her relationship with Ed?

9. Why does Alexis's journey to Plaka enable Sofia to reveal aspects of her past that she had previously kept shrouded in secrecy?

10. How does leprosy connect with secrecy in the Petrakis family, and how does illness serve as a larger metaphor for the characters in The Island?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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