Island of Wings

                              
              Karin Altenberg är en svensk författare som skriver på engelska. Hennes debutroman Island of Wings nominerades för det brittiska litteraturpriset Orange Prize for Fiction 2012.

                                                                     
Karin Altenberg
Island of Wings
Quercus

July, 1830. On the ten-hour sailing west from the Hebrides to the islands of St Kilda, everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil MacKenzie. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders and Lizzie, his new wife, is pregnant with their first child. Neil's journey is evangelical: a testing and strengthening of his own faith against the old pagan ways of the St Kildans, but it is also a passage to atonement. For Lizzie – bright, beautiful and devoted – this is an adventure, a voyage into the unknown.

As the two adjust to life on an exposed archipelago on the edge of civilisation, where natives live in squalor and babies perish mysteriously in their first week, their marriage – and their sanity – is threatened. Is Lizzie a wilful temptress drawing him away from his faith? Is Neil's zealous Christianity unhinging into madness? And who, or what, is haunting the moors and cliff-tops?

Born and brought up in southern Sweden, Karin Altenberg moved to Britain to study in 1996. She holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of Reading. Recently, she has worked in the fields of international arts management and cultural heritage. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London.

/Martina