书名：The Island 岛
作者：Victoria Hislop 维多利亚·希斯洛普
出版社名称：William Morrow 
出版时间：2007
语种：英文
ISBN：9780061340321
商品尺寸：13.5 x 2.7 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：480

The Island《岛》是英国作家维多利亚·希斯洛普的长篇处女作，发表于2005年。书一出版便引起巨大轰动，两个月内即力压《达芬奇密码》《追风筝的人》《哈利波特》，登上英国各大畅销书排行榜首，后成为年度销量第1名。
其惊世骇俗的故事和感人肺腑的情节迅速征服了英伦，征服了欧洲、美洲、澳洲、亚洲，全球千百万读者为之唏嘘落泪。欧洲媒体称：“当今欧洲可以与J.K.罗琳比肩的优秀作家。”美洲媒体评论：“一部能够使人回味一生的凄美作品。

媒体评价：
“在这个浮华的时代，你有多长时间没有为一个书中故事潸然泪下了？这个风靡欧洲的故事，衣婉悲伤，令人禁不住泪流满目。”——《泰晤士报》
“作品充满了家族传奇、爱恨纠葛，以及令人悲凉不安的秘密。”——《观察家》
“在这部让人无法释手的处女作里，作者用战争、悲情和悬疑述说了一个来自地中海的感人肺腑的故事。”——《You》
“这部哀婉的小说较大的魅力在于：在悲凉的情节里，也始终能看到希望。”——《卫报》
“作者重启那个遥远的、令世界谈虎色变的话题，故事沉重而忧伤。”——《出版家周刊》
“即使在那个“污秽荒凉”的不祥之地，也总能寻找到灿烂的鲜花。”——“理查与茱蒂”电视读书俱乐部
“作者试图从不可预测的冲突和屡屡打碎的片段中，从生活被毁又被重建、爱情被毁又重生希望的揪心纠葛中，让人感受生命的悲伤。”——《旗帜晚报》

Victoria Hislop’s first novelThe Island is an international bestseller. It was selected for the Richard and Judy Summer Read, and won Victoria the “Newcomer of the Year” Award at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2007.
Review
Travel writer Hislop’s unwieldy debut novel opens with 25-year-old Alexis leaving Britain for Crete, her mother Sofia’s homeland, hoping to ferret out the secrets of Sofia’s past and thereby get a handle on her own turbulent life. Sofia’s friend Fortini tells Alexis of her grandmother Anna, and great-aunt Maria. Their mother (Alexis’s great-grandmother) contracted leprosy in 1939 and went off to a leper colony on the nearby island of Spinalonga, leaving them with their father. Anna snags a wealthy husband, Andreas, but smolders for his renegade cousin, Manoli. When philanderer Manoli chooses Maria, Anna is furious. Conveniently, Maria also contracts leprosy and is exiled, allowing Anna to conduct an affair with Manoli. Meanwhile, Maria feels an attraction to her doctor, who may have similar feelings. Though the plot is satisfyingly twisty, the characters play one note apiece (Anna is prone to dramatic outrages, Maria is humble and kind, and their love interests are jealous and aggressive). Hislop’s portrayal of leprosy—those afflicted and the evolving treatment—during the 1940s and 1950s is convincing, but readers may find the narrative’s preoccupation with chronicling the minutiae of daily life tedious. (July)  ——FromPublishers Weekly
When beloved schoolteacher Eleni is diagnosed with leprosy, she is exiled to the Greek island of Spinalonga. Left behind on Crete are her husband and two beautiful daughters, headstrong Anna and dutiful Maria. Years later, Eleni’s great-granddaughter Alexis returns to Crete to find answers to her family’s mysteries. Conveniently, a witness to her family history is still alive to tell her—and us—the dark story. The novel is a romantic page-turner, but a little shallow. For example, the Nazi occupation of Crete becomes a plot device to turn the boy next door into a hunk, and, after much tribulation, the good are rewarded and the bad punished. The novel, successful in Britain, will probably be a popular beach read and book club selection this summer. There’s little to object to in this historical romp. Block, Marta Segal    ——FromBooklist

多年来，阿丽克西斯发觉母亲总是过分守护着自己的过去，不仅掩埋了自己的根，还把上面的泥土踩得结结实实。阿丽克西斯决定打开母亲尘封的过去。她来到爱琴海的布拉卡，登上一座叫斯皮纳龙格的荒凉小岛。这是一处禁地，一处令布拉卡、爱琴海，甚至整个欧洲都谈虎色变的禁地，更是母亲的禁地。
禁地打开，一个融合爱恨纠葛的凄凉故事怆然铺展，一曲令整个欧洲潸然泪下的生死悲欢徐徐打开……
The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation’s leper colony once was located—a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women. There’s Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully cares for her father, and Anna, a wild child hungry for passion and a life anywhere but Plaka. And finally there’s Alexis, Eleni’s great-granddaughter, visiting modern-day Greece to unlock her family’s past.
A richly enchanting novel of lives and loves unfolding against the backdrop of the Mediterranean during World War II,The Island is an enthralling story of dreams and desires, of secrets desperately hidden, and of leprosy’s touch on an unforgettable family.

维多利亚·希斯洛普（Victoria Hislop），英国著名作家。早期在《星期日电讯报》《每日电讯报》《妇女与家庭》等开设专栏，以优美温婉的文笔和清新感人的故事享有盛誉，被称为“没有著作的著名作家”。
Victoria Hislop is the internationally bestselling author ofThe Island and The Return. She writes travel features for theSunday Telegraph,Mail on Sunday,House & Garden, andWoman & Home. She divides her time among rural Kent, London, and Crete. She is married and has two children.

Plaka, 2001
Unfurled from its mooring, the rope flew through the air and sprayed the woman’s bare arms with droplets of seawater. They soon dried, and as the sun beat down on her from a cloudless sky she noticed that her skin sparkled with intricate patterns of salty crystals, like a tattoo in diamonds. Alexis was the only passenger in the small, battered boat, and as it chugged away from the quay in the direction of the lonely, unpeopled island ahead of them she shuddered, as she thought of all the men and women who had travelled there before her.
Spinalonga. She played with the word, rolling it around her tongue like an olive stone. The island lay directly ahead, and as the boat approached the great Venetian fortification which fronted the sea, she felt both the pull of its past and an overpowering sense of what it still meant in the present. This, she speculated, might be a place where history was still warm, not stone cold, where the inhabitants were real not mythical. How different that would make it from the ancient palaces and sites she had spent the past few weeks, months—even years—visiting.
Alexis could have spent another day clambering over the ruins of Knossos, conjuring up in her mind from those chunky fragments how life had been lived there over four thousand years before. Of late, however, she had begun to feel that this was a past so remote as to be almost beyond the reach of her imagination, and certainly beyond her caring. Though she had a degree in archaeology and a job in a museum, she felt her interest in the subject waning by the day. Her father was an academic with a passion for his subject, and in a childlike way she had simply grown up to believe she would follow in his dusty footsteps. To someone like Marcus Fielding there was no ancient civilisation too far in the past to arouse his interest, but for Alexis, now twenty-five, the bullock she had passed on the road earlier that day had considerably more reality and relevance to her life than the Minotaur at the centre of the legendary Cretan labyrinth ever could.
The direction her career was taking was not, currently, the burning issue in her life. More pressing was her dilemma over Ed. All the while they soaked up the steady warmth of the late summer rays on their Greek island holiday, a line was slowly being drawn under the era of a once promising love affair. Theirs was a relationship that had blossomed in the rarefied microcosm of a university, but in the outside world it had withered and, three years on, was like a sickly cutting that had failed to survive being transplanted from greenhouse to border.
Ed was handsome. This was a matter of fact rather than opinion. But it was his good looks that sometimes annoyed her as much as anything and she was certain that they added to his air of arrogance and his sometimes enviable self-belief. They had gone together, in an ‘opposites attract’ sort of way, Alexis with her pale skin and dark hair and eyes and Ed with his blond, blue-eyed, almost Aryan looks. Sometimes, however, she felt her own wilder nature being bleached out by Ed’s need for discipline and order and she knew this was not what she wanted; even the small measure of spontaneity she craved seemed anathema to him.