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I feel life is a fraud, and I don’t know who to complain to, or even what to complain about. I am sitting on an island, my bum on the sand and my legs and feet in the salty water… I am an island. We are all islands in this sea of uncertainties. The narrative of Solitude Island coincides with a train journey an eighteen-year-old, Lucia, is taking from the port city in Galicia where she grew up to the city where she is going to study for a degree in journalism. Interspersed throughout the narrative are excerpts from a diary, Autumn Diary, written by a tramp who used to live in the square, Matchstick Square, outside the sandwich bar run by Lucia’s parents. Lucia is curious about the tramps’ lives, she observes them from her attic window. The tramps know this, and this is why they have nicknamed her Nosy. The author of the diary is Mara Ribera, but she prefers the name Solitude, or simply Lonely. She has lost the love of her life, Jean Barnard, a French sculptor who was responsible for the statue of a matchstick seller in the centre of the square. We are introduced to some of the other ‘islands’ in the square - Cosme, who rejected the family business in order to pursue his vocation as an artist; Marcelino, a blind violinist; some rougher types like Zacarias, a legendary tramp turned criminal, Grimaldi and Pinta… At the first stop on Lucia’s journey, a young man boards the train. Lucia will end up feeling the need to share with him all her experiences, her burning desire to pay attention to the plight of those less fortunate than herself and to redress the balance. Solitude Island won the main award for young people’s literature in Galicia, the Caixa Galicia Foundation (or Jules Verne). An Alfaya has previously published Barefoot Shadow in English, a novel about a family’s conflicting memories of the Spanish Civil War.
