The Island at the End of the World

by Sam Taylor

In a world nearly destroyed by catastrophic floods, one family has been spared. Many years ago, as the waters rose, a father and his three children took to their ark and drifted to the safety of a small island. Life there is a succession of quiet days of music and farming—young Alice, Finn, and Daisy are grateful for their salvation—until the day a stranger swims ashore and threatens to destroy the idyll they have created. Haunting and atmospheric, The Island at the End of the World is a riveting postapocalyptic tale that explores the darkness that lies within the hearts of men.

Genres: Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Adult Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Fantasy

215 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

SAM TAYLOR / BIO
Novelist. Literary translator. Journalist.

Born in Nottinghamshire, England in 1970, Sam Taylor began his career as a journalist with The Observer.

In 2001, he quit his job and moved to southwest France, where he wrote four novels, learned French, and raised a family.

In 2010, he translated his first novel: Laurent Binet's HHhH.

He now lives in the United States and works as a literary translator and author.

Reviews

[Anni · Rating 4 out of 5]

What would it be like to play God in your own manmade post-apocalyptic world? In a reworking of Genesis with echoes of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the author shows how paranoia and guilt soon warp the innocence of Eden. If you like an allegorical sort of novel that makes you think, as well as entertain, this should suit very well.

Extract
You were only clearing your throat that day, weren't you Lord? Only warning me of what was to come. But it was enough. Blind as I had been, I saw the light that day. I sold my cars and began taking the bus to work. I cut up Mary's credit cards and put the villa on the market. As for my 'work', I suddenly saw through it, saw what a sick joke it truly was. After the quake, I could no longer fake interest in what particular combination of words would best help sell sugar-pumped breakfast cereals to borderline obese 6 to 10 year-olds in the fucking Midwest ....




Reviewed on www.whichbook.net

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strong little book. A family lives in an ark on a remote hilltop after a great flood has destroyed the rest of the world. Chapters alternate between different family members. Pa's voice mixes religious platitudes and profanity. He's obviously disturbed, more than a little wine-sodden. Is it the stress of keeping his children alive, or something else?

Nine-year-old Finn lives up to his name, narrating in an uneducated, spelling-challenged way. I actually found this aspect of the book a little hard to believe. Even if you only have three books, you'd probably pick up written language better than this. But the phonetic spellings do capture a kid's voice.

Alice is thirteen, the only child who remembers enough of the world before to question what Pa says. She's definitely going through a tough puberty, wants to know more about the world. Her voice is Shakespeare-besotted, overwrought teen to the nth degree.

The third child doesn't narrate. Sweet little Daisy is too little to narrate, but she's caught in the middle of the family dramatics.

Alice and Finn are both beginning to have some doubts about Pa when a man arrives from the world that supposedly doesn't exist anymore. From there, the story gains speed. You'll be through the pages in no time.

It's an interesting story (I'm still trying to figure how parts of work logistically, but I can't explain them or I'll spoil the story.) Any reader with experience will enjoy the allusions this book draws up: Shakespeare, the Bible, Huckleberry Finn, The Road, and other apocalyptic and trapped on an island tales. There's a music in the voices that Taylor creates for his character and some truly creepy moments. Highly recommended.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

A little Romeo and Juliet, a little Adam and Eve, entirely creepy. The child narrator's voice was extremely annoying: "He askt us if we wer hurt an that wer all he never askt wat we wer do-ing..."

Then there was that horrible scene in the very beginning where the father kills the boy's cat, then sticks the cat in a game trap to make it look like an accident...

Not to mention the incest.

Just no.

[Aloysiusweasley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I came very close to putting this book down after the second chapter, and me putting down a book unfinished happens exceedingly rarely. The chapters were written by the different viewpoints of the father, the son Finn, and the oldest child Alice. The father is a religious fanatic who has serious rage issues and apparently enjoys the word 'fuck', Finn's chapters are very difficult to read unless you are fluent in chatspeak, as they are written with phonetic spelling that is a combination of how a child might spell, and how the author THINKS a child might spell. In all chapters, punctuation appears to be optional, and seems to be alternately written in dialogue between characters and a stream of thought that is difficult to get into.

The book moves at a slow pace, and the father killing the cat Snowy early on and the repeated references to it as Finn speaks at the cat's grave are disturbing. I strongly dislike ambiguous endings which this book has a doozy (setting up for a sequel? I hope not), and overall, definitely has confusing moments. It did have a few somewhat interesting bits, but leave this one on the shelf, you aren't missing a thing.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book solely because I liked the cover and it was on sale. Briefly put, I’ve never read a book that shook me as much as Island at the End of the World. I was completely unprepared for the writing (which I actually liked, though it seems many hated it), organization, storyline, and ending. I’d read it again.

[Caleb Thayer]

Student Name: Caleb Thayer Date Submitted: 3/29/2019
Book Title: The Island at the End of the World Lexile: 590


Personal Response: In my opinion, The Island at the End of the World is a very confusing book. The ending is very confusing and creepy. It seems that at the end, Pa killed Will and Alice then it takes Finn's perspective where he says well all live happily ever after.

Plot: At the beginning of the book, Pa finds a boat coming towards his island. Although he doesn't tell his kids about the boat. After awhile Pa kills Finn's cat but tells him it stepped in one of the bear traps. Then the boat arrives at the island and it's Will. Pa and Will start arguing and later it turns into fighting. Pa ends up killing Alice and Will.

Recommendation: I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a book with suspense and action. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes realistic fiction. I would also recommend this book to an older audience because there is swearing in the book.

[Sharon]

DNF - page 29 (13%)

(June 19, 2025)

So 1. I have absolutely no idea where this book came from and entered my house and 2. it features my absolute LEAST favorite and MOST despised literary technique wherein first person narration characters purposefully misspell words. I understand the purpose, but it practically becomes unreadable to me.
I'm not even going to try to keep going with this one.

[Josh Krysak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Serviceable, speculative post-apocalyptic fiction.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing style/perspectives are a little difficult to get used to, but once you get into the flow of the writing the story is impossible to put down!

[Kiel Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the twist at the end was satisfying, the chapters written from Finn's perspective are hard to trudge through mostly because of the formatting, spelling of words, lack of quotation marks around dialogue, et cetera. The sentence fragments throughout the work seem to make an attempt at capturing a stream of the narrator's thoughts, but they, too, are jarring and interrupt the natural flow of reading.

[Lindsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it's LOST fever, but I felt compelled to indulge in some post-apocalyptic island lit, and the cover sucked me the rest of the way in. But even with relatively low expectations, the novel fell flat for me. The plot hinges on the arrival of a stranger to an island (that one, in the title... you know... at the "end of the world"?) inhabited only by a man and his three children, though the "stranger" figures very little into the actual story. The first half of the book, narrated in alternating chapters by father and son (likely aged about ten, maybe twelve) spends a lot of time elaborating on the island lifestyle, though not in any particularly interesting way. Taylor uses cliched but effective narrative devices to distinguish these voices - the father speaks in a sort of Biblical terminology peppered with almost Tourettic expletives, and the son in an quaint little string of poetic phonetic run-ons meant to belie his innocence and wonderment. Taylor wastes no time in letting readers know that the father is not as holy or wholesome as he seems and might be more on the crazy side of isolationist, and while the father's bits grow a bit redundant we do see his grip on reality crumble and dissolve completely as the novel progresses. Still, his character remains relatively flat, and none of the other characters ever really move beyond cliches, either. When, in the second part of the novel, the narration switches to chapters alternating the now rapidly maddening father and his eldest daughter, the angsty, teenaged Alice, Taylor's devices become even more cliched and awkward. Alice infuses her account of events with overly dramatic Shakespearian flair, his plays being one of only literary works (The Bible and a book of fairy tales being the other two) to have survived the great flood which brought everyone here in the first place. Or... WAS it a great flood that brought everyone there in the first place? Taylor often hints that the father has in some way deceived his children throughout the novel, but the extent to which this turns out to be so is more far-fetched than the idea of actual apocalypse. The timeline was also a minor point of contention for me; while basically linear, it was a tad too choppy and a bit out of synch. A stronger writer might convince me this was an attempt to set an uneasy mood for the reader, Taylor's failures in character development, believable story, general continuity, and inability to provide a satisfying ending reduce his experimentation with sequence seem amateur. There were a few descriptive passages that resonated but they were counteracted by some really awkward incest-esque scenes - yes, the novel goes there. There were so many other routes this author could have taken, so many aspects of this book that in more deft hands could have transformed it into something wonderful - it flirts with religion and family issues, seems like it wants to lambaste capitalist America, and then gets lost in a vague exploration of those ever-confusing father figures, but never sees these concepts through. While it is a breezily short read I feel that it could only have been helped by a hundred more pages or so of good, solid writing, added depth to characters, a bit more explanation regarding timeline and events, and a more climactic ending, but without these, the novel remains forgettable. Let's hope LOST has a better ending.

[Raymond · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I never reached the level of enjoyment I was hoping for, The Island at the End of the World is worth the read, if you've already started. While it wasn't fully satisfying, the book has many LIKES that I found beautiful. The thoughts some of the characters have are so provocative and insightful. It's delightful to really get INTO some of the character's minds, especially the mind of Alice, who at one point believes that a bird could never be sad and perhaps wouldn't mind becoming one in her next life (145-6), which she touches again later: "Strangely, the higher I go, the less frightened I feel. The ground is so far below now, I sense I would have time to die and be transformed into a bird before I even hit the bottom" (204). Another LIKE that elevated the book for me was the mind of the main character, the father who is trying to do the best for his family. The conditions in which they are in are mysterious and you can't help to pity and ponder what exactly is too far. I feel you never really get too far into his logistics but you'll see what I'm trying to say as you're reading. Once you're done you'll be wondering what exactly was in the best intentions.

The ending has a slightly eerie feeling to it, which I felt really put a nice touch to the end of the book, which is definitely another LIKE. So while it may not be WOAH, there are a lot of OOOHs that made the read worth while. Just don't expect an epic adventure.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Initially interesting, but ultimately uneven, unsatisfying and, at times, infuriating.

At first glance it seems that there has been a great flood, leaving only a small family - Pa, elder daughter Alice, son Finn, and younger daughter Daisy - living on an island after sailing there in the Ark built by Pa. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Pa is mentally ill and that the children's beliefs of how they came to be where they are are all lies engineered by Pa to support the life he's chosen to lead following an acute psychotic breakdown.

The truth is very, very slowly revealed (though not wholly) after a 'stranger' washes up onshore, and here is where the story started to lose me. I was originally drawn in by the mode of storytelling - alternating between the voices of Pa, Finn and Alice - which gave us enough tantalising glimpses of information to pique my interest and become invested in unravelling the mystery. However, as Pa's mental state deteriorated, his hate-filled religious mania became increasingly incoherent (which made sense from his character's point of view, but made the reading experience difficult), whilst Finn and Alice don't know enough to fully illuminate what's happening and so I found myself in doubt as to what was transpiring as we approached the end, which turned out to be a vague and unsatisfying resolution.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m somewhat surprised by the reasons people have for giving this low stars. Maybe I’m approaching this book differently from other readers, but I just don’t think this book is well-crafted enough. This is the last of Sam Taylor’s books to be published that isn’t a translation, and I wonder if that is just because the problems I have with this book I have with his previous book, The Amnesiac. I think in general Taylor has brilliant premises and interesting approaches to themes those premises explore. I also have no problem with his ambiguity. Ambiguity allows us as readers to interpret the world he’s provided us with the clues he’s left for us. My problems lie primarily with Taylor’s approach to narration and description.

The father’s point of view (followed by Alice’s) are by far the best defined. While the father’s earliest chapters fail to provide a strong sense of visual description, there is an emotional power to his narration that drives these early chapters and by the second half of the book, he has come much more into focus. (Too bad Taylor didn’t revise the first half a bit more to better match the second half.) Alice’s occasionally has moments that feel unrealistic to me- that she is a character envisioned by a man rather than a female character herself. (I understand this struggle.) Again, another draft might have been enough to make her feel more real and further complex.

Finn however needs the most work. While his narration seems to echo the narration of his namesake, Huckleberry Finn, his dialect doesn’t seem to accurately reflect his characterization. I can’t gauge his age. I just get the sense that he is supposedly illiterate but I don’t understand why his narration would look like this since he isn’t writing an account down for us. Worse still, I don’t understand why we are entering his point of view at all when Finn doesn’t seem to develop the plot in a meaningful enough way.

I won’t give away the ending, but there is something interesting in this novel going on with the failures of patriarchy and religiosity. There may also be an allegory about storytelling present in here based on the characters names, but if this is the case, the allegory doesn’t feel nearly as developed as the critiques of religious masculinity are here.

[Gav]

What would happen if there was a great flood? Would you be lucky enough to hear a message from God and have enough time to build an Ark before the rains came? Well that’s what seems to happen to Pa and his children Finn, Alice and Daisy in The Island at the End of the World.

But soon the reader questions the reality of that situation. Pa isn’t as enlightened or as idilic a father as he first appears. He’s hiding something. Something in the Afterwoods. He makes and drinks a lot of wine. His temper isn’t tempered and his anger causes redness around his vision when it flares. And most importantly he’s scared of contamination.

And it’s this contamination that’s the centre of The Island at the End of the World. Though the seeds are sawn early on it’s firmed up with the arrival of a young man called Will.
The viewpoint switches from Finn’s, whose voice is written like it sounds, making it a challenging read. His child-like view of what appears to be happening plays off Pa’s more revelatory information. These are interspersed with those of Alice who sees that their life isn’t as idyllic or as simple as Pa would like.

This story centres around a father trying to do the right thing by his children. The trouble is that Pa isn’t a nice or sympathetic character. His children get more of my sympathy especially Alice being the oldest and being able to remember things before the flood.

Not everything works however – part does come from my problems with Pa. It’s hard to read a story with a dominating unsympathetic main character. My other problem comes from the way in which Taylor chooses to erode the Island. It isn’t quite believable even with the fable-like quality to the storytelling. Taylor allows too much reality to creep making some of The Island at the End of the World implausible.

The redeeming qualities though are the characters of Alice and Finn and their voices and view points. And it’s worth reading for quality of writing and the exploration of the idea of contamination even in Paradise.

This is definitely an important read for parents who feel that they want to bring up their children in away from modern life. And it might be useful for children everywhere to see that being a parent ain’t easy.

[S D · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started reading the novel, it kept me interested but at the same felt...underwhelming. Briefly, I considered dropping the book. The first half of the novel switches between two point-of-views: the father and the son.

The father’s sections are well-written and kept me engaged. He’s clearly off his rocker, but I just sped through his sections, eager to read more. But the son’s sections were considerably less so. The son, Finn, is young and thus his sections are written in a dialectic that is both annoying and hard to read. Examples abound on this site, but here is one: “He askt us if we wer hurt an that wer all he never askt wat we wer do-ing…”

It's very Faulkner, and like Faulkner I hate reading them. The idea is nice, I'm glad someone did it, but stop doing it. It's not enjoyable, cute, or anything above mildly interesting.

As I ventured through this novel, I kept wondering why the novel insisted on giving me only these two point-of-views. Finn has two sisters, and we even get a stranger, Will, who enters. And it’s not like Finn is the eldest child. Why not put the focus on his sister, Alice?

Then came Part 2, and everything came into focus. Suddenly, we exchange Finn’s sections with Alice’s, switching between the father and Alice. Here is when the story speeds ahead, gripping me until the very last page. It didn’t matter that the last chapter was a return to form with a Finn Chapter.

The characters are well rounded and interesting. The father is insane, but it’s a realistic insanity that I’ve seen time and time again in the real world taken to an operatic degree. He’s a doomsday prepper who, thanks to his own boredom and growing mental instability, has decided to invent an apocalypse so he can live away from society with his children.

Will, the stranger who arrives on the island, is neither the angel Alice makes him out to be nor the devil the father sees him. He’s the savior of the children, the one who comes to reveal what a crazy person their father is, but he also takes advantage of the situation as he engages in a sexual relation with a child whom he’s related to. He’s disgusting in a way that adds to the story.

I loved it. Well, more than half of it. Really LOVED it. But those early Finn chapters hurt my brain.

[Paige Silva · Rating 1 out of 5]

The writing of how the characters speak is going to give me a brain anarism. First, I hate when characters speak in old English, especially if the book is not set in that time period. Like, really? There was an apocalyptic event during modern times, and people just started speaking old English for some reason?? Then, if that wasn't annoying enough, the kids speak that way with a kindergarten level education. It is literally going to cause me to have a brain anarism trying to decipher what they are talking about.

And! Over describing simple things. Like bro calm down everything doesn't have to be poetic.

'I find her in the kitchen drinking milk her top lip painted wite an her fingers and thumbs caging the cup tight like its a bird or a rabbit strulling to scape.'

This kid knows how to spell kitchen but not the word white?? And pick one is it a bird or a rabbit that you want me to imagine this glass of milk apparently struggling to get out of this girl's hands. Cause apparently it's ready to leave thy hands! Or she got the shakes.

I usually try to wait until I'm at least 100 pgs. in. But yeah, I can't. DNF

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book entirely blind. It was a story that I could get thoroughly absorbed into. The ‘mystery’ of the story is fairly obvious but I did enjoy watching it unwind. The Author does away with typical writing conventions from time to time. For example, eschewing full stops when a character is enraged and letting their thoughts spiral onto the page.

Part of my enjoyment came from the unpredictable writing style within the book. It could change at a moments notice to mirror the emotions of characters. I feel like this sporadic writing style could be a total turn-off for some readers though. Sometimes the language can turn and become a bit inaccessible.

[Jennifer Lawler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a chilling tale of one man's psychological unraveling. Delusional Pa builds an ark and sails his three young kids: Alice, Finn and Daisy, to a seemingly deserted island, where they lead a simple life, under the impression that they are the only survivors of a modern-day Biblical flood. When a stranger arrives, the kids begin to question their father's wisdom, and start to ask uncomfortable questions about their missing mother and the so-called "Babylon" of the past. Edge-of-your-
seat stuff.

[Jason Schmidt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allegorical, dark, and at times, logically confusing, but yet, I found myself responding to this. It feels a bit like “The Beach” and “Mosquito Coast” but with a heaping of “Lord of the Flies” (especially in relation to the symbolism and allegories) thrown in. A bit difficult to read - some sections are written in the voice of a child who appears to not know how to write well, often writing phonetically - and some really horrible people, but if you are open to a book that has some dark vulgarity and some even darker biblical ideologies, this may be a solid choice.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

What did I just read? It started off poorly with the terrible kids' spelling every other chapter (not believable bad spelling though) but I thought the story had enough substance to power through the writing, but the last third just spiralled into nonsense. I get that the characters are supposed to be feeling more manic but I had no idea what was going on and I'm not sure I cared what happened to any of them. Apart from the dog, of course.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting forceful book blending two biblical myths. There are lots of ideas about 'God' (as tyrannical psychopath) and 'Man' (as tyrannical psychopath), a bit of Plato's cave too (as exposed watery island). The narrative voice of the child was distracting and distancing at times but I know this book will stay with me.

[Natasha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of all the books I have read, this is possibly one of the ones I disliked the most. Although I can understand the reason for the language the phonetically spelt stream of consciousness made it difficult and tedious to read. Having preserved through the book I was hoping to have a resolution or and ending, but the multiple stories that are developed through the book go precisely no-where.

[Mckenzee Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting but very weird book. I loved the story and the chapters narrated by Alice and Pa were good, although I hated the way that Finn's chapter's were written. The concept of this is super cool, and I did find that a decent knowledge of the (Old Testament of the) Bible and some of Shakespeare's plays was helpful. I would recommend this.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I finished it. Can't say that I enjoyed it much, and am still scratching my head at some of the author's decisions with regards to how he chose to present the different narrative voices (primarily that of the son). More annoying than enlightening. Best missed.

[Abby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay I don't know how to include this book on my abandoned shelf without it appearing as "read" but I only read the first 1.5 chapters. About a page into the second chapter I "fuck no'd" out of there. Unreadable honestly. Absolutely not wasting anymore time trying to decipher that shit.

[Kristine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a fast reader and this miserable book was still a waste of time.

[Meann · Rating 2 out of 5]

what a waste of time 👎

[Thita · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was annoying and confusing at the same time. The chapters narated by Finn is difficult (and annoying) to read. There are so many cliffhangers that makes the ending very unsatisfying.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cliffhanger ending that I did not need. No, thank you.