A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

'Enchanting and haunting'
RACHEL RODDY

'A fable for our times'
SPECTATOR

'This novel amazed me. It is the work of a true original'
LUCIE ELVEN

'A seaside Gothic tale teeming with superstition and mistrust'
READINGS MONTHLY

Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left. Her best friend, apart from her older sister Giovanna, is a donkey. Giulia and Giovanna's days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.

Until the men arrive. And a foreign yacht anchors at the port. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes.

From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.