The Island of Forgetting: A Novel

Written by Jasmine Sealy

Narrated by Varia Williams

WINNER of the Amazon First Novel Award

Finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Award

Finalist for OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

How does memory become myth? How do lies become family lore? How do we escape the trauma of the past when the truth has been forgotten? 

Barbados, 1962. Lost soul Iapetus roams the island, scared and alone, driven mad after witnessing his father’s death at the hands of his mother and his older brother, Cronus. Just before Iapetus is lost forever, he has a son, but the baby is not enough to save him from himself—or his family’s secrets. 

Seventeen years later, Iapetus’s son, the stoic Atlas, lives in a loveless house, under the care of his uncle, Cronus, and in the shadow of his charismatic cousin Z. Knowing little about the tragic circumstances of his father’s life, Atlas must choose between his desire to flee the island and his loyalty to the uncle who raised him. 

Time passes. Atlas’s daughter, Calypso, is a beautiful and wilful teenager who is desperate to avoid being trapped in a life of drudgery at her uncle Z’s hotel. When she falls dangerously in love with a visiting real estate developer, she finds herself entangled in her uncle’s shady dealings, a pawn in the games of the powerful men around her. 

It is now 2019. Calypso’s son, Nautilus, is on a path of self-destruction as he grapples with his fatherless condition, his mixed-race identity and his complicated feelings of attraction towards his best friend, Daniel. Then one night, after making an impulsive decision, Nautilus finds himself exiled to Canada. 

The Island of Forgetting is an intimate saga spanning four generations of one family who run a beachfront hotel. Loosely inspired by Greek mythology, this is a novel about the echo of deep—and sometimes tragic—love and the ways a family’s past can haunt its future.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781443465236

Jasmine Sealy

JASMINE SEALY is a Barbadian-Canadian writer based in Vancouver. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Adda Stories, Cosmonauts Avenue, GEIST, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire and Best Canadian Stories 2021. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing from UBC, Sealy is the former prose editor at PRISM international. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for several prizes including Prairie Fire’s annual fiction contest, the CBC Short Story Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2020 The Island of Forgetting won the UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize.   

Reviews for The Island of Forgetting

[whitney4franklin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loveeee reading Caribbean books especially when they are books about places to which I have a deep affinity. Barbados is my second home so I loved reading about the places and people and being able to see them so vividly in my mind's eye. This author truly has a way with words. Every line created a world of descriptive imagery, tropical scenes, vibrant blues. Even when the scene shifts to places to which I am unfamiliar, I was still able to clearly see the dirty browns and the melancholy that she described.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, the story and the characters broke my heart. No different from real life I suppose. Calypso's too early exposure to sex made my skin crawl. Call me prudish but I wanted to scream at her and her parents for not protecting her innocence. There were so many themes swirling around in this book but most importantly was the fact that history always has a way of repeating itself. This sad tale of a family lost in lies, unforgiveness and regret really does sound like that of many Caribbean families that I know.
In many ways I found the story of this novel very similar to Ingrid Persaud's "Love after Love". Both were great reads.