Island of Wings

Exquisitely written and profoundly moving, Island of Wings is a richly imagined novel about two people struggling to keep their love, and their family, alive in a place of extreme hardship and unearthly beauty. Everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil McKenzie when they arrive at the St. Kilda islands in July of 1830. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders, and Lizzie-bright, beautiful, and devoted-is pregnant with their first child. As the two adjust to life at the edge of civilization, where the natives live in squalor and babies perish mysteriously, their marriage-and their sanity-are soon threatened.

"A beautiful story of love and loss, precise, subtle, spiritually alive."-Andrew O'Hagan, author of Our Fathers

"In her powerfully imagined debut, Karin Altenberg has delivered a post-colonial novel set not in Africa Asia or Australia, but at the edge of the British Isles...ISLAND OF WINGS pairs a portrait of a marriage under extreme stress of social isolation, emotional distance and the death of infant children with a chronicle of the clash between the enlightened faith of the Church of Scotland and the rooted traditions of a Gaelic-speaking pagan place."-Independent (UK)