In one of the most hauntingly beautiful novels of the year, Alison Anderson tells the poignant tale of Fran, a 40-something behavioral ecologist working on Egret Island, a fragile and failing ecosystem off the coast of Mauritius. There to help re-establish the natural ecology of the place and chart the evolution of local birds, Fran loses her assistant and lover, Satish; he vanishes, possibly the victim of foul play. Enter her new assistant, Christian, a displaced Red Cross worker ravaged by the loss of his Serbian wife and child to that war-torn region. Christian, like Fran, driven by grief and guilt, seeks healing and redemption. Soon Fran’s passion for the island infuses him, and the deeper they engage in the work, the deeper their connection to each other grows. However, dark forces threaten them and the island. Anderson uses the theme of man-made destruction and the metaphor of extinction to powerful impact. This exquisitely written and beautifully wrought novel wields an intensity about love, loss and risk perfect for our times.

–Victoria Brownworth

Women like reading about other women going away. Preferably far away, preferably quite alone. We read Frances Mayles’ “Under the Tuscan Sun,” or the memoirs of Jane Goodall or the novels of Harriet Doerr. Every year there comes another anthology of writing from solo female adventurers: I drank yak butter tea, alone; I gazed at Balinese rice paddies, alone; I visited Antarctica alone, alone, alone.

Alison Anderson has written a novel about a woman who is deliciously alone in a place that is as far away as can be imagined. Fran is a research biologist living on Egret Island, a tiny laboratory of a landmass just off Mauritius. In flight from a failed marriage back in Berkeley, she is passionately, maybe fanatically working to save a dying species: “Egret has been designated a nature reserve by the Mauritian government; Fran is the field worker charged by an independent foundation with returning the island to its prehuman condition. She will replace the exotic with the endemic; she will restore birds and small reptiles to their natural habitat. And she will try to save the mourner-bird from extinction.”

If you’re catching a whiff of David Quammen’s nonfiction opus “The Song of the Dodo,” you’re not far off. Anderson has claimed Quammen as a major inspiration.

Fran acknowledges that she’s playing God with this experiment in reverse evolution, and with her monomaniacal vision, her inflexible standards and her short patience with the foibles of human social life, she’s peculiarly well suited to the role of all-controlling deity. At the opening of the book, she’s hunkered down on the island with a new assistant, a former Red Cross delegate by the name of Christian. Her beloved former assistant, Satish, has died mysteriously, and so far she’s unimpressed with his replacement.

Christian, meanwhile, has ghosts of his own. His pregnant girlfriend has disappeared in Bosnia; unable to find her, he’s come to work for Fran as a kind of tropical occupational therapy. So here we are on an island, with two lonely, haunted, disappointed people. They eat separately, get drunk separately, reminisce separately. They nurse their guilt and their secrets. In short, they mope.

In the midst of all this high-octane sulking, Fran and Christian manage to breed a female mourner-bird. Someone, though, sabotages their grand experiment, sneaking onto the island by night and unloosing forbidden mongooses, who smash the birds’ eggs. As they try to protect the mourner-birds, Fran and Christian draw closer to each other. They finally confess to each other their respective stories in the midst of a cataclysmic cyclone of events (if you can’t stand the objective correlative, you’ll definitely want to get out of this kitchen).

There’s a lot of emotional bombast here, of a tastefully hushed sort. This is the kind of writing that always gets called “lyrical” on jacket copy. It’s the kind of writing where dialogue is not set off in quotation marks, where the scenes are broken up by lots of spacious white pauses, where Fran, cooking her dinner one evening, thinks to herself, “I am flavoring my solitude. ” Just as high-flown is the moral tone of the book, which can, and does, slip into sanctimony. Here’s Anderson describing Fran’s decidedly un-social social life: “When she first came to the island, the white Anglo community tried to invite her to teas, to cocktail parties. She quickly tired of their talk of material things, of their polite indifference to her work.” Teas! Cocktail parties! Material things! How unspeakably crass.

Still, despite my low-grade irritation with Anderson’s mannerisms, I found myself reluctant to part company with Fran. I wanted to stay there, basking in the company of this brainy, tough-ish dame. Anderson has, in a sense, written the ultimate woman-alone fantasy. Fran has meaningful work, a successful career, a highly developed interior life and devoted young male assistants. This is what alone looks like, when we’re dreaming. The woman has her own island, for crying out loud.

At the end of the novel, we find Fran, alone again, sitting in her old colonial cottage, “her pen poised above a blank page. But she is not writing. She is listening to the sounds of nightfall: the ever-present surf, a dying wind in the trees, the conversation of birds – fodies, mynahs, bulbuls, warning of darkness, urging haste.” Oh, to write idly in a notebook. To listen to the birds. We stop for a moment, imagining ourselves there on the wave-lapped island. And then we shut the book, and argue with the kids, and answer the telephone and get ready for work. •

Claire Dederer is a Seattle writer.

Occasionally, a book comes along that truly surprises you. Initially, the exquisite cover art on DARWIN’S WINK drew me to it. Then a particularly enticing description of the plot hooked me even further. But just a few words into it, I was blissfully lost to the story. Alison Anderson choreographed this novel with poetic sentences. It overflows with thought-provoking passages and fresh, stimulating ideas. The flyleaf says this book is a novel of nature and love. I would add that it is also a novel of beauty and happiness — and of sorrow and strength.

Fran, a divorced American naturalist on the down side of 40, struggles to keep the mourner bird population from extinction. The fragile existence on Egret Island, a mere half-mile off the coast of posh Mauritius, constantly challenges Fran’s abilities. Her assistant, a man she cared too much for, met with a mysterious accident. Now, a young displaced Red Cross worker, Christian, has arrived to help in her conservation efforts. He comes hoping to heal the scars left by a horrific parting with a Serbian woman he once loved. War tore her from him, and now he works to find a way to forget, to find a way to go on.

Fran is working to heal her scars as well. She may be as much in danger of extinction as the bird she has pledged to protect. Despite a deceptive crusty exterior, she is soft inside. She opens her heart too easily, and it is broken too often. The things she loves frequently go away, leaving her with only bittersweet memories. But she does have memories, and she cherishes them, bringing them out at dusk to relive the joy they once brought her.

While these two souls are trying to find their own peace, at least one person is trying to drive them from the island. And their tactics are anything but gentle. Unfortunately — for them — they don’t realize the dedication they are up against. Fran fervently believes in her work. “She accepts the inevitability of death but refuses the inevitability of extinction.” Thus, she will fight with a fierce determination to combat island predators — whether they be of the four-legged or the two-legged variety. And Christian discovers that he is afflicted with her passion.

Prepare to spend some time with this gem. It is not meant to be rushed through, not with writing this good. A lot is packed into its 272 pages. And, once you reach the end, I believe you will instantly want to start over again, just to have the pleasure of savoring the words anew.

- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

“I got lost in the island worlds created in this novel – the physical island on which the novel is set, the emotional islands the two main characters create around themselves, and the island of love they both come to inhabit. Give this one a try!” –Andrea Avantaggio, Maria’s Bookshop, Durango, CO

In an elegiac and haunting tale of healing and survival, two emotionally wounded biologists find solace in each other as they struggle to save a rare bird from the brink of extinction. Situated just off the coast of Mauritius, Egret Island is a fragile environment. Within the refuge provided by its primitive conditions, Fran, an American naturalist, and Christian, her Swiss assistant, withdraw to atone for losses in which they unwittingly played a part. For Fran it was the death, perhaps murder, of her lover and previous assistant, while Christian copes with the loss of the woman he loved while working for the Red Cross in war-torn Bosnia. As tortured as they are by their pasts, however, they must also confront a sinister future as the island’s inhabitants, and nature, conspire to destroy everything they are trying to protect. Luminously written, with a hypnotic sensuality that fairly shimmers, Anderson’s deeply affecting tale of the beauty and brutality of nature pits the forces of evolution against the fragility of emotion.

Carol Haggas, Booklist

Two lonely hearts try to protect an endangered species of bird and the paradisiacal island on which they live from mysterious agents of destruction in Anderson’s dreamy, lushly written second novel… Christian, a disenchanted, 30-something Swiss man haunted by his experiences as a Red Cross worker in Bosnia, comes to Egret Island, “a short green poem of a place” off the coast of Mauritius, to work for Fran, a middle-aged, outwardly brusque American naturalist seeking to restore the island to its original, untouched state and the endangered mourner-bird to its previous strength.Like Christian, who left behind a pregnant lover, Fran has also loved and lost; she tries to confine herself to a cerebral approach to work and life, blunting her sexual frissons and painful flashbacks through Darwinian logic. But as an unseen menace stalks the island, seeking to destroy both the birds and their caretakers, Fran and Christian are propelled toward romantic union–a well-worn conceit given some resonance by the novel’s governing idiom of biology, instinct and the odd “stochastic factor, or… Darwin’s wink”: the nonsensical gap in biological progress that throws predictability off course. Readers will find the plot distantly secondary to the novel’s rich emotional palette, as Anderson captures the expansive beauty of Mauritius and the nuances of human character with languid, sensual prose.

Publishers Weekly

Isolated from the mainland, Fran and Christian strive to save a species of bird from extinction on an island near Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Reticent to reveal their personal losses to the other, their relationship remains professional until a combination of human sabotage and a typhoon push them into a deeper bond of mutual reliance. Much like Hidden Latitudes (LJ June 1, 1996 v121 n10 p146), the story is told from both characters’ points of view, takes place on a remote island, and pits human survival against the harshness of nature. Devoting her life and academic career to studying and saving the birds, Fran empathizes when infertility assails them, and catalogs the failure of her marriage and the untimely death of her lover, while Christian forgets the horrors he experienced as a Red Cross delegate in Bosnia with a beautiful indigenous woman. Anderson lends her wise observations of human psyche to another lyrical book and perfectly captures the conjunction of colonialism, gender issues and Third-World economic development. Highly recommended for all libraries.
—Rebecca Tolley-Stokes, East Tennessee State Univ. Lib., Johnson City

Pat Holt, San Francisco Chronicle

This beautifully conceived and executed novel by Mill Valley writer Alison Anderson follows parallel stories, told in alternating voices, of three people who are stranded—or are they placed?—on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

One story is about Lucy and Robin, a married couple attempting to sail the ocean in a 35-foot sailboat. Eighty miles off course, their boat, Stowaway, runs aground on a reef that circles the small island. There it becomes apparent that the couple’s marriage has reached a “slow crisis,” much like this voyage, thinks Lucy, “moving slowly through viscous time towards disaster.”

The other story is about a woman in her 70s who watches Robin and Lucy from her hidden shelter among the palm trees. This woman has lived on the island for more than 40 years and is, we presume, Amelia Earhart. References are made to the navigator of her last flight, Fred Noonan, her years of adventure and celebrity as a famous American aviatrix, her promotion-conscious husband, G.P. Putnam, and the crash of her airplane, the Electra, near the island during the summer of 1937.

Advisers had told her that the plane “would be visible like a huge scar on the skin of the sea,” but the ocean soon consumed it, “and the island—welcoming enough as a temporary and beautiful wilderness before a supposed return to a relieved world—was suddenly hostile, as if it did not want me to be there either.”

So Robin and Lucy are now at the same stage the woman reached 40 years ago, hovering between horror at being “lost” and intrigue at finding this small (2-by-1/2 mile) patch of land. Where they feel “a disturbing obscenity to this solitude,” the older woman long ago found a “state of grace on the island.”

Their fear about dwindling supplies (water, canned goods) is mirrored by the older woman’s experience of the bounty of nature (bananas, papaya, breadfruit, shrimp, octopus, crab, taro root, heart of palm). They begin to feel “the greed of time, as of sharks”; she has discovered “a life outside time” in which the stars and clouds speak to her of life and the universe. They bicker and exhaust each other, using sex as a shield against fear; for her, “the elements are my lover,” the wind “a caress” and the ocean full of vital “gifts.”

Perhaps most important, Robin and Lucy find it impossible to read their map of the ocean, just as they can no longer read each other. But during “lightning storms of intense beauty, illuminating the world,” the older woman “can see all the islands spread like stars across the vastness of the Pacific.”

As the two stories reflect each other, mirroring becomes a continuing metaphor. Lucy’s journal is so full of mundane descriptions of her moods that she “took a grim triumph in seeing herself reflected on paper. This was not writing after all, she concluded, but was unable to break away from her own reflection. She was surrounded by a mirrored surface of ocean.”

The woman on the island, though, has no mirror and thus sees herself as “no old woman” at all. “There are no wrinkles, no lines, no sad wasting of the flesh. No judgment, no pity, no indifference. I see only a sentient being in a body touched with the grace of belonging.”

She acts, however, as a mirror or chorus to Robin and Lucy, reflecting their shallow emotions and shaky attempts at boat repair by pondering what is now a shared destiny: Having landed on this island, can any of them “return” to what they call civilization? Or are all of them already returned to some deep level of origin?

The question may be moot for the woman, who has so merged with the natural force of her universe that whatever she imagines comes “true”—she dreams of snow and wakes to find “a fine cloth of white lay upon the island.” And “if I imagine now, leaving the island, the sky darkens, the trees grow wild, wind-thrashed.”

But she does take action, silently visiting the boat when Robin and Lucy are exploring the island; taking a few tokens—some jam, a book, a magazine—whose absence is immediately noticed by Robin and Lucy. They hear her in the water, even spy a footprint, and wonder if a ghost is about to help or harm them. And just when we think the boat’s name, Stowaway, has special meaning for the woman who might be Amelia Earhart, novelist Anderson tosses in a few surprises that keep us engrossed to the last pages.

In “Hidden Latitudes,” Anderson’s exquisite melding of two stories in one novel provides a poetic and deeply moving ideation of destiny, natural law and human passage. It’s also a whopper of a story.

In this novel, Amelia Earhart, a castaway, decides she just doesn’t want to be rescued.

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, disappeared from the face of the earth. Coast Guard and Navy planes and ships dispatched to comb the area between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island found nothing but ocean. Since then, the search has continued in books and films analyzing Earhart’s motives for flying around the world, and in some case theorizing about what happened the day she disappeared. The simplest theory suggests that she ran out of gas over the Pacific; the more speculative, that she was pushed into an ill-considered flight in an ill-equipped plane by her publicity-happy husband, who had booked her into 70 post-flight lectures. There is even a conspiracy theory that has her on a spying mission for the United States to photograph Japanese island installations, during which she was either shot of forced down and then taken to Japan, where she became one of the English voices of the “Tokyo Rose” broadcasts.

Given the mystery of Earhart’s fate, it was inevitable that novelists would try their hand at filling in the blanks. Alison Anderson’s first novel, “Hidden Latitudes,” offers up Earhart as an unnamed elderly castaway, her account of her life and times on an unknown island is often vivid and moving despite an annoying side story.

When the novel opens, with the approach of a sailboat called the Stowaway, the Earhart character has been stranded for more than 40 years. The couple on board, Robin and Lucy, are in grave danger because their engine has failed, a situation that becomes more problematic when the hull of the Stowaway is damaged on a reef as they enter the lagoon. This clever setup seems to forecast the discovery of the famous aviator and her possible return to civilization. When she first sees the Stowaway on the horizon, Earhart considers lighting a signal fire, as she has done in the past whenever a ship was near. But then she has second thoughts: “I wonder if rescue would still be worth it.”

The underpinnings of this startling revelation come in a series of dreamlike soliloquies as, carefully hidden, she watches Robin and Lucy work on their boat or explore the island. She muses about her flying career, the crash, the difficulties she and Fred encountered in adapting to a new existence. There are harrowing accounts of the appearance of Japanese sailors during the war and of the brief visit of an islander who refused to take her into his flimsy boat when he departed.

“It took me a long time to like it here,” Earhart confides. Not until Fred rowed off in a rubber dinghy to spare her the pain of watching him die from an infection did she “surrender” to the “magic” of her environment, a mystical serenity that “might end and return to the deep source of the island” if she reveals herself to Robin and Lucy.

The greatest strength of “Hidden Latitudes” lies in Ms. Anderson’s ability to show how isolation redefines Earhart’s character. The ache of loneliness, her growing intimacy with nature, the way she ultimately finds consolation in self-awareness tap into something elemental that catches fire in the reader’s imagination. Though Earhart’s ambivalence toward rescue initially seems far-fetched, it quickly becomes believable once we understand that her familiarity with the island has replaced her feelings about the world she came from. The place she knew is now the unknown, the dangerous.

Unfortunately, the Earhart chapters are far more affecting than those devoted to Robin and Lucy, though the description of a tropical storm in one of them is among the best things in the book. The main problem is that the damaged boat blatantly symbolizes the troubled marriage of these disaffected teachers sailing around the world in search of meaning. Robin wants a child to solidify their relationship; Lucy doesn’t, afraid it would tie her down and make her even more dependent on her husband. Both reflect obsessively on what has gone wrong between them. Here is Robin, repairing the hull: “Easy to fix, in a way, he thinks; if only wounds to the human heart were as simple to repair.” After satisfying sex on the beach, Lucy thinks that the problem with their marriage “is that we do not have enough moments like that, of spontaneity, sensuality, abandon. We run on rails, we don’t know how to get off, so we speed on through, everything becoming a blur of the half-seen, the half-felt. We miss the richness of the wayside.”

Such writing, with its echo of “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” columns, becalms the narrative between the Earhart chapters. But despite the generic conflict between Robin and Lucy, “Hidden Latitudes” succeeds in making Amelia Earhart’s isolation and attendant fears palpable. Ms. Anderson’s rendering of the aviator’s hard-won serenity leads one to hope that if she lived beyond July 2, 1937, it was with the grace she is granted here.

Lawrence Thornton, The New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1996.