Island Style: 7 Historical Novels Set on Islands

Winner of the American Book Award in 1990 and now a Penguin Classic introduced by Patrick Rosal, this commanding novel features a bustling cast of recurring characters, from a DJ to a general. Through electric prose, voice-driven and poetic, readers witness Manila, a metropolitan city in the Philippines, during a dictator’s rule. I’ve returned to the opening of this exploration of beauty, gossip, and survival numerous times, “1956. The air-conditioned darkness of the Avenue Theatre smells of flowery pomade, sugary chocolates, cigarette smoke, and sweat.”

Delving into bravery, community, and rebellion, Alvarez’s poignant novel interrogates the murder of three of the Mirabel sisters at the end of Trujillo’s reign. Hearkening back to 1938 and reaching over half a century in the Dominican Republic, it envisions the formative years of Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and Dedé and follows las mariposas into adulthood, marriage, and motherhood. Celebrating their commitment to change, the novel’s present is anchored by the only surviving Mirabel sibling, who “remembers a clear moonlit night before the future began. They are sitting in the cool darkness under the anacahuita tree in the front yard, in the rockers, telling stories, drinking guanabana juice. Good for the nerves, Mamá always says.”

After a mysterious matriarch’s death, Pono’s four mixed granddaughters reunite when they inherit her property. Over 150 years, this innovative debut novel examines Hawai‘i through seven generations. Recently, I started rereading the family saga and marveled over the prose. A winding sentence about the cousins’ grandmother’s home, “what they chose to remember as their beginning,” especially mesmerized me, “The house was set in coffee orchards in the misty blue hills of Captain Cook, part of an archipelago of tiny towns with ‘talk-song’ names—Hōlualoa, Kainali‘u, Kealakekua, Honaunau—the coffee-growing belt of the district of Kona, set high on an island so lush and volatile and mystic, it had too many names.” How elated I am that Davenport’s House of Many Gods perches on my library cart.

Beginning in the 1900s as the Virgin Islands transitioned from the control of the Danish to the U.S. and stretching over six decades, Yanique’s magical story follows three generations of the Bradshaw family. Set primarily on St. Thomas, this ruminates on desire, destiny, and responsibility. Featuring multiple perspectives—as well as a strange shipwreck and familial curses—the compact, melodic chapters ooze poetry, “[T]hese islands are just too beautiful. You walk out of your own front door into cathedrals. You step down your own stairs up toward an altar. God speaks from the bougainvillea bush, from Mountain Top. You go to the beach and swim in holy water.”

During the February 28 uprising of 1947, Li Min’s contractions intensify, and she births the novel’s narrator on the night martial law begins in Taiwan. For making an impassioned speech in public, her father, Dr. Tsai, is imprisoned for 11 years. He spends some of that time on a “tiny place just off the eastern coast of Taiwan” called Green Island—“[a] beautiful name for the home of the Oasis Villa, the political prison.” Later, living the “American Dream” in Berkeley, the protagonist’s mind dwells on Taiwan, and she returns again and again. Reflecting on deceit, estrangement, and love, Ryan’s captivating sophomore title won the American Book Award in 2017.

Filled with lyrical prose, this unfolds in Papeete, on the island of Tahiti, and on Huahine, as France’s nuclear testing nears an end. Marc Antoine Chen, the gorgeous heir to his father’s pearl business, falls for his cousin Marie-Laure Li. After he returns from France to news of his father’s engagement to his business partner, Marc refuses to halve the company and starts a clandestine operation. Meditating on class, magic, and secrets, this book’s longing and stunning description moved me: “When I was fifteen or sixteen, living on the pearl atolls with my father, the silence seemed beautiful. Silence had a color then, the aqua blue of the lagoon, the turquoise of the deeper waters, the color of clouds and all the hopeful dreams I had.”