‘The Island’ by Victoria Hislop

In the summer of 2001 Victoria Hislop, who had not written a novel before, visited the island of Spinalonga just off the north eastern coast of Crete while she was on holiday. Apparently the very next day she started writing this fantastic book set on the island and in the village of Plaka just across the bay. It was a very good decision because her debut novel went on to sell some three million copies following its publication in 2005.

The story takes a group of characters from 1939 through the German occupation of Crete and onwards into the 1970s. The plot has something of a soap opera character to it and is not, in all honesty, wholly dissimilar to the kind of thing the BBC serves up each week on Eastenders, with a big unexpected murder occurring half way through. But what makes it so good is less the family saga that provides its narrative engine, but the extraordinary setting. Spinalonga was from 1904 until 1957 a leper colony, and its social history is utterly fascinating.

‘The Island’ is one of the most plain enjoyable novels I have read in a while. This is the best kind of historic fiction, being meticulously well-researched and factually authentic, but splendidly imaginative too. You learn a huge amount while reading it about leprosy as a disease (in its different forms), the appalling stigma that sufferers and their families had to put up with after diagnosis, and happily the way that a cure was eventually found, allowing people who had been sent forever to live in isolation in leper colonies to return to normal life in the 1950s. It is all extraordinarily interesting.

The characters are all well-drawn and believable with flaws as well as compensating virtues. There are heroes, heroines and villains, but all motivations are explored sympathetically keeping the pages turning. It is all beautifully done, the writing conveying the passion of the author for her subject in every chapter.