William Wall

William Wall is the author of four novels, three collections of poetry, and two previous volumes of short fiction. His work has won many prizes, including the Virginia Faulkner Award, the Patrick Kavanagh Award, and the Sean O’Faolain Prize. He has been short- or longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Irish Book Awards, the Raymond Carver Prize, and the Manchester Fiction Prize, among others. His work has been translated into many languages, and he translates from Italian.

The Islands

Six Fictions

By William Wall

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.