Off the coast of the small town of Truror is an island steeped in local legend, a place once home to mysterious religious orders and apocryphal lost settlements...a place that seems, in the right fog, to lift right out of the water and fly. This peculiar past has made the island, in the present, a minor tourist attraction, drawing sightseers and the devout alike. On an otherwise routine tour, Jake Isinglass, a native son of Truror and guide to the island, witnesses something he can t explain: a young woman falls from an island cliff to her death...or jumps to her death...or vanishes into thin air. What follows in Jake s investigation finds him uncovering not just the island s difficult history but his own. Written in evocative, atmospheric prose, The Guide to the Flying Island is at once a ghost story, a mystery, and a meditation on the ways our lives remain haunted by the secrets of our pasts.
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Lee Upton has long been one of my favorite poets and now, with The Guide to the Flying Island, she's become one of my favorite fiction writers, too. This is a beautifully written, one-of-a-kind book, a spooky, lovely novella about tour guides and missing nuns and monks, a wry and deeply felt story of love and obsession (if there's a difference). I couldn't put it down, and once I'd finished it, I couldn't wait to read it again.
—Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers'; Homes in New England and Carrying the Torch.
Lee Upton's The Guide to the Flying Island is a carefully nuanced enchantment which unfolds in the community around an isolated island chapel and on the threshold between the psychological and the metaphysical. As I watched Jake Isinglass attempt to unravel the mysteries of a missing nun and the loss of his mother, I was captivated by the mist-filled maritime setting and the enigmatic behavior of locals and pilgrims. Any fan of Picnic at Hanging Rock or The Magus will be spellbound by Upton's deft prose and compelling characters. --R.T. Smith, author of Faith and Uke Rivers Delivers
About the Author
Lee Upton is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Undid in the Land of Undone, and four books of literary criticism. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, and awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her fiction has appeared in the Antioch Review, Epoch, Shenandoah, and other journals.
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Lee Upton was born in Michigan and hoped to be a writer practically from the moment she learned to read. Her writing has received multiple awards, and her poetry, fiction, and essays appear widely. Her most recent book is The Guide to the Flying Island. She has a special affection for that book; the ending was as much a surprise to her as it's likely to be a surprise to any reader.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Another world,
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This review is from: The Guide to the Flying Island: A Novella (Paperback)
There is a place and need for the extended rhapsodies of Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon. But there is also a place and a need for the small gem like Sexing the Cherry, or the Bloody Chamber. It is in the latter group we can place Lee Upton's Guide to the Flying Island.
In evocative, dense prose, Upton portrays the flying island of the title and the people who are part of its world. It is a place of pilgrimage and tourism, but ultimately I think it is also the fact of our existence, and our over-the-shoulder look there awakens in us a sense of the ghosts who inhabit our lives. The island is in the end a place souls of all sorts retreat to and sometimes depart from. It is a beautiful little book.
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