To accompany this week’s substack dedicated to “Islomania,” I’ve included a 33 min. audiobook of my short story Mal d’Isola. It will take you on a trip to Alicudi, the loneliest of the Aeolian sisters.
“An hour later they reach their destination: Alicudi, the last island in the chain: a blackened cone with a narrow lip of purplish boulders along the shoreline. The slopes are terraced all the way up with massive stone walls where caper bushes cascade in clusters. Not a tree in sight, only the jagged spears of giant agaves and aloes, and foaming canopies of magenta bougainvillea. No one else gets off at this stop. They are the very last passengers on board, and as soon as they have been deposited on shore, the hydrofoil turns back. This is the furthest it can go, except perhaps on to Africa…
“It looks like the last outpost,” she says. The last outpost before what, she doesn’t know.
“You’re such a pessimist,” her husband says…”.
I hope you enjoy listening.
Read the accompanying “Islomania” substack here
Islomania
Like many people all over the world, I have long suffered from islomania – a disease first cited in Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus where the author claims that his friend Gideon discovered the term in a medical textbook. “Isolmania,” Gideon explains, is “an affliction of the spirit.” He goes on to say “
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