Nine Island

Among the most deeply felt, richly conveyed works on aging and interiority you're likely to find. Alison scatters clipped and woozy prose against a purgatorial Miami backdrop, eliciting a cocoon-like intimacy on topics of lust, literature, longing, and entropy. Sexy and mournful, Nine Island is a where-has-this-been-all-my-life reading experience that had me swooning from start to end. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com

Nine Island is an intimate autobiographical novel, told by J, a woman who lives in a glass tower on one of Miami Beach’s lush Venetian Islands. After decades of disaster with men, she is trying to decide whether to withdraw forever from romantic love. Having just returned to Miami from a month long reunion with an old flame, "Sir Gold," and a visit to her fragile mother, J begins translating Ovid’s magical stories about the transformations caused by Eros. "A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years," she thinks.

When not ruminating over her sexual past and current fantasies, in the company of only her aging cat, J observes the comic, sometimes steamy goings-on among her faded-glamour condo neighbors. One of them, a caring nurse, befriends her, eventually offering the opinion that "if you retire from love...then you retire from life." Set against the backdrop of exquisitely beautiful flora, fauna, and seascapes, Nine Island culminates with a breathtaking gift, from one friend to another.

"The free form of Alison's prose will keep you on your toes, and her meditations on the absence and presence of love will touch your heart." Elle, "The 11 Best Books for September 2016"

"Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once." Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

"Wonderful....With echoes of Molly Bloom's soliloquy and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, Alison has forged a haunting and emotionally precise portrait, a beautiful reminder that solitude does not equal loneliness." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Evocative, sad, at times funny, and never completely without hope, Nine Island studies what it means to be alone later in life." Kirkus Reviews

"Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

Nine Island is an intimate autobiographical novel, told by J, a woman who lives in a glass tower on one of Miami Beach's lush Venetian Islands. After decades of disaster with men, she is trying to decide whether to withdraw forever from romantic love. Having just returned to Miami from a monthlong reunion with an old flame, "Sir Gold," and a visit to her fragile mother, J begins translating Ovid's magical stories about the transformations caused by Eros. "A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years," she thinks.

When not ruminating over her sexual past and current fantasies, in the company of only her aging cat, J observes the comic, sometimes steamy goings-on among her faded-glamour condo neighbors. One of them, a caring nurse, befriends her, eventually offering the opinion that "if you retire from love . . . then you retire from life."

Jane Alison is the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, and three novels—The Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, and Natives and Exotics—and the translator of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation, Change Me. She is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville.