A pathbreaking exploration of the international and intercultural connections within Oceanian performance

Entries from the long-lost journal of Ven, a Nain youth, relate his adventures as he faces pirates and is rescued by a mermaid and a kindly sea captain who sends Ven to an inn, where he encounters fairies, ghosts, and other strange boarders.

William Wall is the first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides. Dominated by the tragic loss of a third sister at a young age, their family spirals out of control. We witness three stages of the sisters' lives, each taking place on an island—in southwest Ireland, southern England, and the Bay of Naples. Beautifully and sparsely written, the stories deeply evoke landscape and character, and are suffused with a keen eye for detail and metaphor.

This book is a unique treasury of information about one of nature's marvels: floating islands. It bibliography contains more than 1,500 citations of books and articles in 20 languages on the subject. The entries are annotated and cross-referenced, and there are both thematic and geographic indices. All aspects of floating islands are addressed.