Archipelago

by Andrew Smith

"The history of a war wasn’t a tale that could be captured by a single tongue, a single pair of eyes. The greatest narratives would be witnessed from one hundred eyes at once, and each and every one of their accounts was worth the effort of its telling. They were a multitude of threads, woven together into a rich, rainbow tapestry. Each strand was short, but their unique colours and textures were each invaluable to the whole."

The Crown Isles are at war: not with each other, but with themselves. From the mountains of Tal Obira to the vast and winding River Stem, their cities compete for primacy. Within those cities are divisions of their own, a million stories of war and peace, love and heartbreak, life and death: stories written in scars and wrinkles, told in chapters of weeks and pages of days, and all overlapping to form one coherent whole.

This is one slice of it: an anthology novel about war and peace, love and heartbreak, life and death, told through a day in the life of forty-four people who face them all.

546 pages, Unknown Binding

Reviews

[Andrew Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn’t a story, it’s a love-letter to a daydreamed world. It’s less a book than a map, charted through a day in the life of forty-four individuals, its plotlines sketched like coastlines through their own private worlds, rivers running through their conversations and their voyages towards contrasting dreams.

It’s fluid without being fluent, shifting from one perspective to the next, fresh characters and locations to meet and leave behind just as you have learnt the contents of their soul. I expect the experience will be jarring, tiring, thoroughly put-down-able. It will undoubtedly be hard to read. I can only hope that readers will still appreciate how much harder it was to write.

[Lucianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Logged back into goodreads and betrayed The Storygraph just so I could log that I'm reading this. I hope you're happy Andrew.