cover image Forgotten Island

Forgotten Island

Sasha Troyan. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, $23.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-1-58234-464-5

In The Forgotten Island, Sasha Troyan's lush, languid second novel (after Angels in the Morning), a child bears witness to her parents' domestic strife and her sister's disappearance in a Mediterranean paradise. On Bella Terra, home to gorgeous summer villas and luxuriant overflowing gardens, 11-year-old Helen and her beautiful, selfish and destructive older sister, Lea, antagonize a neighboring painter and alternately flirt with and defy their troubled parents and their parents' odd friends, the Ashtons. Troyan weaves loving, sensual descriptions of place and characters with cryptic exchanges and a muted sense of foreboding as the novel moves toward its inevitable and haunting conclusion.