Talk About Books

This is a work of historical fiction. Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follows Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very different backgrounds, as they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective. Though Mi-ja and Young-sook are fictional characters. the diving women are real and have existed for generations. Over many decades—through the Japanese colonialism of the 1930s and 1940s, World War II, the Korean War, and the era of cellphones and wet suits for the women divers—Mi-ja and Young-sook develop the closest of bonds. Nevertheless, their differences are impossible to ignore: Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, forever marking her, and Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers. After hundreds of dives and years of friendship, forces outside their control will push their relationship to the breaking point. This beautiful, thoughtful nove...

On his first night in New South Wales, in 1806, William Thornhill—Thames boatman, thief, banished convict—gazes despairingly into the forest outside his flimsy hut. A spear-wielding Aborigine appears before him, and his dejection turns to rage. All he has is his family—“those soft parcels of flesh,” sleeping behind him—and “the dirt under his bare feet, his small grip on this unknown place,” and he is not about to give them up to a naked black stranger. The Aborigine responds with equal vehemence: “Be off, be off!” The episode shows, in miniature, the project of Grenville’s magnificent novel—an unflinching exploration of modern Australia’s origins. Like the settlers, we instinctively turn away from the ugly truths behind every cleared riverbank and every posted fence. But Grenville’s psychological acuity, and the sheer gorgeousness of her descriptions of the territory being fought over, pulls us ever deeper into a time when one community’s opportunity spelled another...