Desolation Island
  • Published: 6 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446468241
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400

Desolation Island

Formats & editions
EBook
6 Oct 2011
Paperback
15 Oct 2012
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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...
  • Published: 6 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446468241
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
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About the author

Adolfo García Ortega

Adolfo García 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.

Praise for Desolation Island

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 País

A good old-fashioned mariner’s adventure – though bursting with postmodern strangeness

Holly Kyte, Sunday Telegraph

A wonderful novel... We are between Odysseus' journey, the kernel of the epic novel, and Melville's Moby Dick... This novel aims to go to the heart of literature, to take up once more the almost extinguished call of ancient and contemporary heroes

ABC

An adventure story...extravagantly enthralling

Michael Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement

An ambitious and successful novel that confronts the reader with important questions: love, death, identity, evil...

El Periodico

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 Bolaño-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

Rarely has fiction been so truthful. Rarely has reading been so vital and so absorbing

La Vanguardia