What I would hope is that the book unsettles people and that they go away thinking and interrogating their own behavior, their own thought patterns.

Karin Jennings is here to talk about her new novel in Ireland, which was a long-listed finalist for the Booker Prize.

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And the Times is critics Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs join us to talk about books they've recently reviewed.

This is the Book Review Podcast. It's June 3rd. I'm John Williams.

Karin Jennings is a poet and a fiction writer. Her first novel published in the United States is in Ireland. It was long-listed for the Booker Prize last year and Karin joins us from her home in South Africa to talk about it. Hi, thanks for being here.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm very pleased to be here.

In the Book Review, Lydia Millett called the book beautifully and sparingly constructed and she said, no plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully.

We're going to try anyway. Give us a little bit of a sense of what the plot of the book is.

Oh, well, now that you've just said that's impossible to do. You're giving me an impossible task. It is a novel that's set on a fictional island somewhere that is unnamed so that there is a sense of universality to it.

And the action of the novel is quite limited. It all takes place on this island where Samuel is an old man. He's a lighthouse keeper there and he's been living there for a long time and he's got his home.

He's got his routine. It's his safe place. And then right at the start of the novel, what happens is that a refugee washes up on the shore and he's unsettled by this.

He is upset that there is the strict to his peace and what happens is as he begins to interact with this man, he begins to have memories of quite traumatic events throughout his life on the mainland from his childhood through to his time as a political prisoner and then to when he came to the island.

And so Samuel came to the island. I think 23 years ago. Is that right? He's been there for that long. Yes. So certainly more than two decades a long time.

And what is his normal interaction with people? There's just a supply boat that comes by every so often is that the only time he sees other people.

Yes, it's about once a fortnight that the supply boat comes and he's really isolated and he's got his little garden. He's got his chickens. He's very fond of his chickens. And the island, I suppose, is his friend.

There is no other human company for him. And so it is quite upsetting for him to have this threat of the refugee who's also a younger man and they also they don't speak the same language.

So communication is quite difficult and he doesn't trust the refugee.

The opening scene of the book I have to say is one of the more gripping ones I've read recently it involves the refugee washing up on shore. And what Samuel tells us is that this has happened many times, but that the refugees have always been unfortunately dead when they wash up on shore.

And he believes that this refugee is at first as well, but then realizes that he's in fact barely alive.

So that's seen one of the first things that came to you. I don't want to be reductive, but it's so striking that I wonder if it was one of the first things you thought of in terms of setting the story in motion and how the story came to you.

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