Karina Author, Book, Review

Christine Coates reviews AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings

An Island by Karen Jennings — everyone is talking about this book. There are other reviews but had to add mine!
It’s a small gem but also a great masterpiece. Very Coetzeesque. It reminded me of Disgrace. Just brilliant and by one so young. Her observation of human life and behavior is acute. I can’t get it out of my mind.
The author wanted to explore certain complexities relating to the history of the African continent and how that history continues to influence the lives of individuals to this day but the island could be anywhere — off Africa, off South or Central America, off the US, off Australia.

Goodreads
Karina Author, Book, Review

Karin Schimke writes about AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings

… In An Island, specificity is jettisoned, as evidenced by the use of “an” and not “the”. The character is an old man called Samuel who tends to a lighthouse, a colonial remnant, off the coast of an unnamed African country, first clawed at and pawed and squeezed and ravaged by colonial overlords, then sucked dry by the country’s dictatorial “saviour”. Samuel is a nothing, a nobody, uneducated and unheroic, but he has had the one tiny luck of getting a job manning the lighthouse on the island after he is released from decades in a prison for being an enemy of the state (which sounds much grander than his actions were). But even on an island, history and the present catch up: sea creatures, once abundant, dwindle, plastic rubbish dots the landscape…and bodies of refugees wash ashore. There is no escaping the world’s violence, malice, greed and selfishness. And there is no protection from what those do to the self. No man is an island. […]

An Island is bleak and stark, and Jennings writes in plain sentences. I read An Island in what would have been one sitting, had it not been for the interruption of night.

Karin Schimke Instagram
Karina Author, Book, Interview

Karen Jennings interviewed by Phumi Ramalepe for Business Insider SA

Karen Jennings

“… Unlike many authors who measure the success of a book based on sales figures, Jennings believes it’s all about how you feel about your work.  

‘For me, it depends on how I feel about any manuscript once I have finally finished writing the various drafts. If I get to the end and feel a thrill pass through me, then I am satisfied,’ she said.

‘I enjoy that feeling because it doesn’t last very long. I think many writers, or artists in general, have this sense that their work is never good enough,’ Jennings added.”

Business Insider SA
Karina Author, Book, Review

Woman Zone CT Review: AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings

“… But having cracked open the slender spine, I found it  to be even more unassuming and quiet – no prologue, no fanfare, no arcane dedication, hand-picked lines of poetry – even the acknowledgements are a mere eight grateful lines – but exquisite in its simplicity.
​‘The First Day’ announces the opening chapter – and with that you step ashore. Onto Samuel’s island. Where he’s been lighthouse keeper for over two decades. Washing up with you is a body – one of many that have found their way onto the pebbly and unwelcoming beach.
You come to know well, if not its exact whereabouts off Africa, the lie of the island, its nooks, crannies, secret spots. As well as Samuel’s sparse, isolated cottage where everything has its place. But you don’t stay there. Because as his memory is jolted by the arrival of this body, this man, Samuel’s reflections take us back into the dark, sometimes troubled past he was marked by on the mainland. Again, Jennings doesn’t pinpoint the exact times and places of this not so long ago time but if you live towards the tip of Africa, you can feel it in your southern bones. Smell it in her carefully chosen words. By ‘The Fourth Day’, I was all but holding my breath.  
I’m ashamed to have taken so long, but richer for reading such a thoughtful book, with a punch way above its weight.” 

Woman Zone CT
Karina Author, Book, Review

John Self reviews An Island by Karen Jennings

This is a book that gives us faith that the Booker prize judges are doing their job, for two reasons. The first is that this is the dark horse of the longlist, released quietly by a micro-publisher, unreviewed in the press until now, so it shows the judges aren’t just guided by big names.

An Island is the third novel by Karen Jennings, a South African novelist living in Brazil. It throws us into the world of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper who has withdrawn from the world and whose main concerns are looking after his chickens and maintaining his toenails. Oh, and occasionally he harvests corpses — refugees, others — who wash up on his shores. Unfortunately for Samuel, the 33rd dead body to arrive in his 23 years on the island turns out, despite his hopes, not to be dead after all.

The Times
Karina Author, Book, Interview

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett interviewed Karen Jennings for the Guardian

The South African author struggled to find a publisher for her Booker-nominated novel An Island, which only had a print-run of 500 copies. She talks about rejection, her country and believing in herself

Karen Jennings is still in shock. It has been a few days since the announcement that her novel, An Island, has been longlisted for the Booker prize, and the 38-year-old South African author looks as though she’s reeling. Considering the novel’s difficult route to publication, you can understand why. She doesn’t even have an agent.

“It was incredibly difficult to find a publisher,” she says, via video chat from Brazil, where she has spent the pandemic alongside her Brazilian husband, a scientist. Due to being essentially stranded there, she has yet to hold an actual physical copy of the book in her hands. “I finished the novel in 2017. And no one was interested. When I did finally get a small publisher in the UK and a small publisher in South Africa to co-publish, they couldn’t get anyone to review the book. We couldn’t get people to write endorsement quotes, or blurbs.”

Guardian
Karina Author, Book, Interview

Karen Jennings on Afternoon Drive with John Maytham

Listen to Karen Jennings’s moving interview with CapeTalk’s John Maytham:

Karen Jennings on Afternoon Drive with John Maytham

‘Earlier this week, we heard that two South Africans, both of them University of Cape Town graduates, have been long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize – Karen Jennings and Damon Galgut. Well today, we speak to Karen, who made it onto the prestigious list for her book, “An Island”, which follows the tale of an old lighthouse keeper who finds the unconscious body of a refugee on his beach.’

Karina Author, Book, Prize

AN ISLAND by KAREN JENNINGS longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize!

Karavan Press is thrilled and deeply honoured to announce that An Island by Karen Jennings has been longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Co-published with UK publisher, Holland House Books, An Island tells the story of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper.

Samuel has lived alone for a long time; one morning he finds the sea has brought someone to offer companionship and to threaten his solitude …

A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history. In this new man’s presence he begins to consider, as he did in his youth, what is meant by land and to whom it should belong. To what lengths will a person go in order to ensure that what is theirs will not be taken from them?

A novel about guilt and fear, friendship and rejection; about the meaning of home.

“The far southern extremities of our planet produce remarkable, distilled, and ravaged tales. An Island has to be counted as among the most remarkable of these. Karen Jennings offers a chilling, immersive portrait of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper on a remote island off the African continent. He is a man at the edge of history, until the arrival of a refugee stranger returns him to everything he most needs to forget. A gripping, terrifying and unforgettable story.”  — Elleke Boehmer

THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST ANNOUNCEMENT

HOLLAND HOUSE BOOKS EDITION OF AN ISLAND