On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga - Greece's former leper colony. Then she finds Fortini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island, and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip...

The New York Times Book Review called Jane Rogers' Mr. Wroe's Virgins "an engaging, serious, and gleefully ironic novel, one that leaps headlong into the most ambitious territories: faith, love, and existential meaning". In Island, Rogers describes a place where things are not quite as they appear; a strange place where the murder of a reclusive woman is not a cut and dried case.Nikki Black, intent on punishing the mother who abandoned her at birth, goes to the island with only one aim in mind: revenge. But her plans are confounded by the discovery of family connections she knew nothing about. A brother strangely possessed by their mother, a brother with a terrifying violent streak, an apparent simpleton whose head is filled with the stories of past Islanders, crofters, Vikings, little people. A brother whose dangerous love and strange quotes seeing the world transform Nikki's life.