The Last Kings of Sark

By Rosa Rankin-Gee

From the author of Dreamland 
 
'My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy.'

Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island, the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She has been hired for the summer to give tuition to a rich local boy called Pip. But when she arrives, the family is unsettling- Pip is awkward, over-literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.

Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something surprising starts to touch the three together.

But those strange, golden weeks cannot last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything.

Compelling, dark and funny, The Last Kings of Sark is tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from one of our most exciting young writers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398518650

Rosa Rankin-Gee

ROSA RANKIN-GEE grew up in Kensal Rise, London, but now lives by the Parc de Belleville in Paris. In 2010, she was one of Esquire magazine's '75 Brilliant Young Brits'. In 2011, she won Shakespeare & Company's international Paris Literary Prize. Rosa runs a night-bird version of a Book Club, where up to 300 people come to swap books and drink cocktails in the former home of George Bizet. Rosa has been profiled in the New York Times and Huffington Post among others. She is twenty-six.

Reviews for The Last Kings of Sark

[booklovers2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

 Interesting Coming of Age Story, The story is about 3 Teenagers from different backgrounds spend the summer together on Sark. A Polish cook, an English tutor and the son of the family who hired the girls. Someone reviewed that it fell apart mid way - I think it fell apart towards the end. Somehow, the book changed toward the end and had a somewhat haphazard ending that otherwise could have been great

[paradiseporch · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I included this in my reading because of the setting on Sark, one of the Channel Islands, from which my mother-in-law’s family emigrated,(Guernsey), and because it has lovely cover.The story follows three teenagers over the course of a summer on Sark. It’s beautifully written but the plot ends about halfway through and then the book drones on and on.2 stars