Desolation Island

Description

A modern classic- a seafaring tale spanning four centuries of adventure. As the twentieth century draws to a close, a ship heads for Punta Arenas at Chile's southern tip. On board is Oliver Griffin, who is fascinated by the island and spends his life drawing intricate maps of it. He is on an unusual quest, inspired by a photograph of his grandparents embracing a strange automaton that now lives in the Punta Arenas museum. This fearsome metal warrior is a sixteenth-century robot from a proposed mechanical army, commissioned to guard the straight against the English. It was discovered on the island by a grieving woman scouring the archipelago for the bodies of her shipwrecked husband and son, and is now the curious axis around which countless stories spin, surrounded by the terrible yet mesmerizing sea...

Adolfo Garcia Ortega was born in 1958 and lives in Madrid and Barcelona. He is a translator, literary critic, journalist and former editorial director of the prestigious Spanish publishing house Seix Barral. His critically acclaimed novels have won many prizes. Desolation Island is his first book to be translated into English.

An adventure story...extravagantly enthralling -- Michael Kerrigan * Times Literary Supplement * It's a rich, complicated, eccentric gumbo of a book... An epic tale of the restless journeys of the mind * Metro * Ortega's energy and relentless inventiveness succeed in creating a seamless and utterly compelling blend of the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. A Bolano-like encyclopaedia...the literary equivalent of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities... One of the most original novels to have appeared in Spain in recent years, Desolation Island is ultimately a magnificent tale of travel * Literary Review * Desolation Island has all the characteristics of a postmodern classic...has all the elements of the classic adventure novel, from The Odyssey to Moby Dick * El Pais * An ambitious and successful novel that confronts the reader with important questions: love, death, identity, evil... * El Periodico *