Contested ground

An Englishman and a Frenchman can't escape a reckoning with history on a tiny Irish island.

- JOSIE SHAPIRO

THE COLONY, by Audrey Magee (Faber, $32.99)

The atmospheric second novel from Irish writer Audrey Magee makes clear its preoccupations in the title. Set over one summer on a small island off the coast of Ireland - only three miles long, half a mile wide, with fewer than 100 inhabitants - this novel breaks down ideas about savage dominion over land and culture and unwanted intercessions by outsiders, all in the most luminous and rhythmic prose.

Arriving on the island this summer is Englishman Lloyd, a wannabe Gauguin. Lugging his easel, his Mars black and his Prussian blue, he plans to paint the cliffs and birds, to create them/as they already are”. The islanders judge him as obnoxious and demanding, although Séamus, or James, the teenage great-grandson of matriarch Bean Uí Floinn, is drawn to the artist. Determined not to be a fisherman - understandable after the deaths of his father, uncle and grandfather at sea - James is lured by the possibilities Lloyd represents.

Suddenly the tensions of the mainland imbue everything on the island with a deeper and more sinister threat.