Emma Sloley’s, The Island Of Last Things, pulls no punches. It is a warning without hesitation, a tragic imagining of an end that is far too plausible, too close to home. Somehow, the story still manages to be beautiful. Bittersweet instead of bitter. It echoes with a deep love of animals and a respect for their sentience and individuality.
The novel is set in a fictional zoo built upon the ruins of a very real-life Alcatraz. Environmental calamity has left the world in the throes of a slow, lingering demise and effectively made every creature on Earth critically endangered. Most species are already gone, and the remnants of our once diverse fauna have become rarer than jewels. In Alcatraz, Camille is one of an elite group of keepers tasked with preserving the last individuals of their respective species. Hers is a dream job on the threshold of the apocalypse. Paradise inside a prison that keeps both the animals and the humans who tend them safe and sheltered from the world.
Until Sailor arrives.
The new keeper draws Camille into an instant infatuation, exposing her to a world of unimaginable hope and unbearable disappointment. Sailor’s quest to save the animals drags them into a world of social dynamics, animal smuggling, drugs, murderous cartels, and the most dangerous realization of all, that it is not only the animals in Alcatraz who are caged, and that a caged animal of any species hovers, always, on the edge of madness.
The Island of Last Things is a beautifully written torture, an agonizing build to an inevitable and simultaneously shocking crescendo. It is dark, and painful, and honest, and despite the setting and themes, somehow laced through with just enough hope to leave the reader satisfied, if somewhat terrified.
This is a book that will stay with you forever.
Frances Pauli writes animal fiction and speculative stories. She is the author of the Serpentia series, the Imbrium novellas, and the award-winning Earth Tigers books. Frances is a voracious reader of animal fiction, and an advocate for books of all types which illuminate the animals’ perspective.