About Fog Island Mountains
- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc. (November 4, 2014)
What if you could rewrite a tragedy? What if you could give grace to someone’s greatest mistake?
Huddled beneath the volcanoes of the Kirishima mountain range in southern Japan, also called the Fog Island Mountains, the inhabitants of small town Komachi are waiting for the biggest of the summer’s typhoons. South African expatriate Alec Chester has lived in Komachi for nearly forty years. Alec considers himself an ordinary man, with common troubles and mundane achievements until his doctor gives him a terminal cancer diagnosis and his wife, Kanae, disappears into the gathering storm. Kanae flees from the terrifying reality of Alec’s diagnosis, even going so far as to tell a childhood friend that she is already a widow. Her willful avoidance of the truth leads her to commit a grave infidelity, and only when Alec is suspected of checking himself out of the hospital to commit a quiet suicide does Kanae come home to face what it will mean to lose her husband.
Narrating this story is Azami, one of Komachi’s oldest and most peculiar inhabitants, the daughter of a famous storyteller with a mysterious story of her own. A haunting and beautiful reinterpretation of the Japanese kitsune folktale tradition, Fog Island Mountains is a novel about the dangers of action taken in grief and of a belief in healing through storytelling.
“Transporting and lyrical, Fog Island Mountains takes a poignant look into a couple’s struggle with terminal illness, and uncovers the sustaining presence of memory, myth, and history in a small Japanese community. Narrated by the all-knowing local storyteller, who provides a perceptive communal voice, Bailat-Jones’s novel is part poem, part suspense story, propelled by the violence of a summer typhoon, the complications of the characters’ grief, and spare, elegiac prose that weaves its own urgent spell.” —Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls
Purchase Links
Amazon | Books-A-Million | Tantor Media
About Michelle Bailat-Jones
Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her novel Fog Island Mountains won the Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction in New York City. She translated Charles Ferdinand Ramuz s 1927 Swiss classic Beauty on Earth. She is the reviews editor at the web journal Necessary Fiction, and her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in a number of journals, including the Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, and the Atticus Review. Michelle lives in Switzerland.
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Michelle Bailat-Jones TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Tuesday, November 4th: The Discerning Reader
Thursday, November 6th: BookNAround
Tuesday, November 11th: No More Grumpy Bookseller
Thursday, November 13th: Bell, Book, & Candle
Monday, November 17th: Book Nerd
Thursday, November 20th: Too Fond
Tuesday, December 2nd: Bibliotica
Wednesday, December 3rd: Regular Rumination
Friday, December 5th: Patricia’s Wisdom
Monday, December 8th: Book Dilettante
Tuesday, December 9th: Olduvai Reads
Wednesday, December 10th: Svetlana’s Reads and Views
Friday, January 16th: Sara’s Organized Chaos