The Guide To The Flying Island
By Lee Upton
2009
First Published
3.70
Average Rating
93
Number of Pages
Fiction. 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.
Avg Rating
3.70
Number of Ratings
20
5 STARS
35%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
10%
2 STARS
20%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads
Author
Lee Upton
Author · 5 books
Lee Upton is the author of thirteen books. Her short story collection The Tao of Humiliation received the BOA Short Fiction Prize. Her awards include the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; and the Miami University Novella Award. Her collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy, received ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award in the category of books about writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Poetry, Harvard Review, FIELD, American Poetry Review, and in numerous journals and anthologies.
