Maraid watches her son, James, striding out across the grass, a bottle of milk for each of their visitors in hand. Magee tracks her two unlikable protagonists as they ransack the island for their own ends, each believing that they have its best interests at heart. I’m really curious to read this one, Sue, and have deliberately avoided most of the spoilers for that reason. I think you raise a valid point about the sections on Ireland’s colonial history (as recounted through Masson’s thesis) – they did feel somewhat dense, but I was happy to go with them as crucial background to the story.

In that novel, emotions were bleached from the page, forcing the reader to dispassionately observe action and reaction, choice and choicelessness. Magee's touch is light, letting the reader form their own conclusions about the encroaching violence.An expertly woven portrait of character and place, a stirring investigation into yearning to find one's way, and an unflinchingly political critique of the long, seething cost of imperialism, Audrey Magee's The Colony is a novel that transports, that celebrates beauty and connection, and that reckons with the inevitable ruptures of independence. There is one exception: James Gillan, 15 years old, is intrigued by Lloyd’s chaotic studio and by the life it seems to promise. and if you intend to read The Colony soon, perhaps you don't need to read more of this review in case the overlay of my experience interferes with your own perspective on the book. The artist who arrives at the island expects to exploit it for his own ends and leaves after achieving them and destroying hopes of some of the inhabitants.

Naturally, there’s also an equally traditional smattering of merciless killing and colonising foreigners.The Colony contains multitudes - on families, on men and women, on rural communities - with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water.

Perhaps this is why, in spite of its minor flaws and oddities, it makes an ultimately satisfying shape in the mind, and creates a mood that lingers discomfitingly after the final page is turned. The only flaw is the novel's oblique and muffled conclusion, when the narrative tension mysteriously dissipates, but I was thoroughly transfixed by this novel until the very end. Financial Times'A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. As the title indicates, Magee situates the Troubles within the framework of colonialism and post-colonialism. His widowed mother – by day secretly life-modelling for Lloyd and by night secretly slipping into JP’s bed – warns that London won’t be easy for him: the Troubles have just claimed Mountbatten.

Magee has conveyed the relationship vividly within a tiny cast seemingly marooned from the unfolding Troubles and yet as affected by it as its victims and perpetrators. An Englishman bringing his baggage to an Irish island: the meaning of such an encounter, in fiction as in reality, depends quite heavily on the year in which it occurs. With dwindling numbers, those remaining need to do what they can to survive, but the odds are stacked against them.

Beyond these narrative pleasures and deft character studies, it's also a subtle allegory of the deep cultural scars left by British colonialism, and the illusory binary of tradition and modernity. Lloyd has come to the island as a Gauguin only to discover that one of the Tahitians is already the finer artist. Not only that, he also makes promises to James, himself an aspiring artist who wants to avoid life as a fisherman at all costs. Her second novel, The Colony, published in 2022, has already been optioned for film and is receiving stellar reviews around the world.Its beautifully realised lament for lost language and cultural sustainability has universal relevance.