The Island

Poet and novelist Kefala was born in Romania in 1931 and began her career in mid-century Australia, where she died in 2022 just as her work, including this dazzling 1984 novel, was being rediscovered. With sensuous and piercing prose, Kefala traces the life of European transplant Melina in post-WWII Sydney. A drama student, Melina navigates love affairs, friendships, and theater productions while wrestling with memories of her childhood in Europe (“I was always on the verge of some dark secret belonging to the adults.... All those frightening things that love and passion brought with them, hot brutalities which I watched with fascination, both drawn and repelled by the spectacle”). The present exerts its pull on her as she falls madly in love with an older man named Dinos: “At his touch the tension flew into the ground and I rose free, full of a silent fever that burnt off my senses and left me full of space and carelessness.” She suffers unbearably when he retreats, only to “savagely” chide herself for being so easily unsettled. The book ends with a long, agitated dream sequence, after which Melina wakes to a new morning. It’s a soaring finale to an extraordinary exploration of desire, love, and loss. Readers will cherish this. (June)