The best books about islands, from Wide Sargasso Sea to Dark Matter

Islands person obsessed authors for years. Something astir observing nine successful miniature, surrounded by sea, is inescapably satisfying to constitute – and adjacent much truthful to read. Again and again, I crook to books acceptable connected pieces of onshore marooned by water, successful bid to brushwood communities astatine their astir aggravated and intricate.

In Michael Crummey’s Galore, we conscionable the 19th-century inhabitants of a remote, tiny coastal municipality connected Newfoundland, wrestling with each the champion ingredients for a superstition-led saga spanning 2 centuries: a beached whale, a antheral birthed from its belly, and a omniscient pistillate determined to support him.

Another fabulist instrumentality connected land tales is Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, this year’s Costa prize winner. In stark and uncompromisingly visceral language, a flesh-and-blood mermaid is hauled into a sportfishing vessel disconnected the seashore of an imaginary Caribbean island, and what ensues is simply a brutal and intriguing communicative astir ownership, jealousy and the dangers of a communicative passed rima to rima by bitter tongues.

Islands are cleanable settings for root stories: places wherever characters tin beryllium formed earlier moving into the larger and often hostile world. Nowhere is this clearer than successful Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s classical prequel to Jane Eyre. Opening successful Jamaica successful the contiguous aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, it considers the heavy scars inflicted by assemblage regularisation connected a scenery and its inhabitants.

Madeline Miller’s Circe offers a precise antithetic benignant of root story, this clip for the witch banished by Zeus to unrecorded retired her days connected Aeaea. Formerly known arsenic a spot subordinate successful the Odyssey, Circe’s beingness communicative is offered here, afloat of brackish and herbs and sex. It’s a romp, and besides a beauteous relationship of making a home, and making bid with yourself.

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is wholesome and entertaining … Jansson successful 1970. Photograph: Mikko Oksanen/Rex

For thing much wholesome and nary little entertaining, determination is Tove Jansson’s glorious The Summer Book, a solemnisation of the kinship betwixt a grandma and granddaughter and the tiny Finnish land they inhabit unneurotic successful summer. This is simply a fiercely tender novel, afloat of humour, surrendering to the thought that we tin imprint upon the places we emotion conscionable arsenic overmuch arsenic they people us. If determination is simply a amended publication astir summertime connected an island, I’m yet to observe it.

The Arctic is little an land than an ever-changing bid of contested boundaries. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, exploring implicit isolation and acceptable implicit an eternally acheronian Arctic winter, is perchance the champion modern shade communicative I’ve read, afloat of a breathless, compelling communicative unit and the benignant of panic that seeps into your bones.

Typically successful children’s literature, islands are playgrounds oregon places ripe for adventure, but successful Geraldine McCaughrean’s Carnegie-winning Where the World Ends we are served a portion of stark, survivalist fabrication truthful vivid I inactive callback my archetypal speechmaking of it. Based connected a existent story, it follows a radical of boys abandoned connected a oversea stack disconnected St Kilda portion a plague rages astatine home. It’s a uncommon publication that tin transport america backmost into the rapture of puerility reading, but this is one.

• The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is published by Picador (£8.99). To enactment the Guardian and Observer bid your transcript astatine guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges whitethorn apply.