REALITY CHECK

Sujit Saraf's new novel, Island, chronicles a dystopian attempt to evangelise the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island

- Srinath Perur

So much of what goes on in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands feels novelistic that it shouldn't be surprising when a novel set there leans particularly heavily on actual events and characters.

In Island we have Steven Li, an American adventurer-missionary who for years has been preparing to go to North Sentinel Island to make Christians of one of the last isolated populations in the world. In Port Blair he recruits Nirmal Chandra Mattoo, a 'fallen' anthropologist.