Readers' Island

Author's name: Michel Bussi

On an island at the edge of the world, five readers come to the Hotel of the Burning Sun for a week to learn to write with a famous author. It all begins with a simple exercise: “Before I die, I would like…” Then the doors open: notebooks to be filled, diaries to be written, wills left on the sea rocks, and manuscripts hidden beneath cotton shirts. Little by little, reading becomes writing, and writing becomes a trap; who narrates whom? Who reads whom? And which page we write reveals more than it conceals?

This is a novel about the reader who dwells within every writer, and the writer who dwells within every reader; about a young Márquezian girl learning about life as she dictates to paper: “My bottle in the ocean,” and about women who came searching for a text, only to discover their own texts, their own faces, and their own secrets. Here, the notebook is a mirror, the first stroke a pen of salvation, and writing a way to catch ourselves before silence swallows us. And here, too, the novel takes the reader by the hand, drawing them into the game: they will read to see themselves in the mirror, they will write within themselves to escape all that burdens them, and they will continue to wonder until the very last page: Did the words save their authors, or did they push them into the abyss?

A moving text about the impact of writing when it saves its author, about its impact when it wounds him, and about reading when it becomes the deepest way of life.