The condition of being cut off—geographically, emotionally, or both—provides fertile ground for fiction. Isolation can be a pressure cooker for conflict and mystery. It can occasion reminiscence and reflection. It can lead to unlikely intimacy. And it can furnish the ideal lab conditions for thought experiments.
My debut novel, The Other Valley, takes place in a small town in the wilderness. It’s so isolated, in fact, that it’s the only town in the world. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have neighbors. The exact same town repeats itself in a chain of adjacent valleys—valleys that are staggered in time. To the east, the town is twenty years ahead in the future; to the west, it’s twenty years in the past. Secretive visits to neighboring valleys are permitted only in rare circumstances. If, for example, you can prove that your grief is unusually severe, you can petition to hike over the mountains and furtively view your lost loved ones in a town where they’re still alive.
The book’s heroine, Odile, starts out lonely and deathly shy. When we meet her as a teenager, she’s so solitary she hardly speaks. Then she accidentally recognizes two grieving visitors to her valley and realizes what it means: one of her classmates is about to die, and she knows who. Sworn to keep her foreknowledge a secret, Odile befriends the boy and begins falling in love, drawing her into a dilemma that could alter the arc of her life.
The eight novels on this list all hinge on types of solitude: spatial dislocation, confinement, aching loneliness, even a few speculative snow-globe worlds. Each book, too, makes a point of showing the haunting beauty that can accompany isolation. Sometimes the meaning of things reverberates most loudly when the walls have closed in.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
The kidnapping of two sisters sets off this locked-room mystery. The room in question: the vast Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, a former Soviet military zone that is still unreachable by road. The girls’ disappearance haunts the novel like a subharmonic frequency, rumbling in the background of various women’s lives as they grapple with the threat of sexual violence and the racist double standards that treat some victims as mattering more than others. Phillips is attracted to Pacific Rim locales—her upcoming Bear takes place in Washington’s San Juan Islands—and Disappearing Earth is an unforgettable evocation of a world on the edge of the world.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
On a remote northern reserve, an Anishinaabe community is preparing for winter when the power goes out. All communication ceases from the south; supply trucks don’t come. What follows is a portrait of the apocalypse as a small town, and a quietly moving tale of resilience and self-sufficiency. Alongside the anxiety of dwindling resources and the inherent tensions of collective action, the pace of life grows pleasantly slow, and conversation replaces entertainment. But when white survivalists arrive demanding access to the reserve, the novel shifts into two simultaneous gears: a realistic thriller, and an icy parable of colonial insatiability.
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, translated by Marjam Idriss
In Paradise Rot, the writer and musician Jenny Hval gives a hallucinatory reinterpretation of Eden as a site of erotic symbiosis. Jo, a Norwegian exchange student, can’t find a room to rent in her new English university town—except in a derelict brewery occupied by a mysterious woman named Carall. Once they begin an affair, the world outside the brewery seems to disappear: “No town, no view, no lights and no islands.” In their isolation Jo and Carrall merge together, and the romantic dissolution of selfhood is depicted as rot. Memories ooze between minds; veins sprout like stems from one and grow into the other. Desire is realized as mutual decomposition in a gross, gorgeous return to the garden.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go is about memory, lies, and hope. Another theme, emblazoned in its title, is loneliness. Kathy is an itinerant “carer” whose adult life is a slow blur of passing fields, motorway pit stops, and hospital visits. As her own ominous transition into a hospital grows near, she reflects on her childhood at a secluded school called Hailsham, before her friends were distributed around England for a purpose long kept secret from them. Ishiguro’s novel is a tender look at the transience of human connection. It’s also a masterpiece of worldbuilding-by-elision that blends golden nostalgia with growing horror.
Shot-Blue by Jesse Ruddock
A boy named Tristan and his mother Rachel live alone and impoverished in an island cabin in northern Canada. Rachel says the cabin is theirs; neighbors on the mainland consider them squatters. When the cabin is destroyed to make way for a resort development, a delirious Rachel wanders into the cold and dies of exposure: “All was white around her, no matter what colour it was. Coated with snow wind-burnt to ice, the black trees reflected the sun so intensely they shone like mirrors.” An orphaned Tristan fends for himself in the one place he can get room and board—the new resort that has replaced his home. Ruddock’s poetic coming-of-age tale achieves an uncommon balance: gem-sharp prose in an enigmatic atmosphere.
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
In an afterword to the 20-year edition of his debut, Warner recalls the first time he admitted to someone that he was trying to write a novel: “It’s about,” he said, “the loneliest girl in the world.” In its opening scene, 21-year-old Morvern Callar discovers that her eccentric boyfriend has “cut His throat with the knife”—and instead of reporting his death, Morvern stays silent. With outward composure and a curt inner monologue, she carries (and then exploits) her secret wherever she goes, from her claustrophobic port town in the Scottish Highlands to the glittering Spanish coast. A macabre marvel that is equally harrowing and droll.
Grove: A Field Novel by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt
Grove’s narrator intended to share an extended stay in Italy with her husband. When he passes away, she travels to the tiny village alone. The result is a natural almanac of grief, remembrance, and renewal. Kinsky has translated Thoreau, and her subtitle “a field novel” is fitting: the book traces a seasonal trajectory and dwells on elemental sensations like the shifting colors of cloud-light, the noises of the marketplace, and the scent of burning olive branches. Despite ready comparisons to Sebald due to its elegiac tone and peripatetic narrator, Grove is warmer and more lyrical, less impersonal and digressive, more fiercely in love with the living.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
On the unnamed island where this novel takes place, things are draining from the world. One day ribbons are disappeared; another day, perfume. With the definitions of the words already growing hazy in people’s minds, the forbidden items are destroyed in bonfires, and the Memory Police scour the island for any remnants that might serve as reminders. Ogawa’s spare surrealism creates a fable-like environment in which everyday artifacts become beautiful, baffling talismans of an inaccessible history. The vanishings vibrate like one half of a metaphor (for totalitarianism, or species loss, or dementia, or simply time), but the ominous narrative is too elusive and free of explanation to be heavy-handed: it’s an equation that refuses to resolve.
