Few and Far Between

By: Jan Carson

From a “deeply talented” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning writer comes an alternate history of Northern Ireland’s recent past where the last remaining residents of a haunted archipelago face imminent eviction from their home.

In 1958, a politician’s ludicrous proposal to create a seventh county for Northern Ireland by draining Lough Neagh—the largest lake in Ireland—was, quite understandably, never implemented. In Few and Far Between, Jan Carson imagines a timeline in which the scheme proceeded. When an archipelago emerges from the receding water, a utopian community establishes itself on the islands, hoping to escape the prejudices and dangers of Troubles-era Northern Ireland.

As children in the 1970s, Marion and Robert-John Connolly moved to “The Ark” with their mercurial father, a prominent anthropologist studying this unique community. When the novel opens in 2017, the siblings are among the final few inhabitants. Sheltered from modernity, they work as the Ark’s caretakers, monitoring the mysterious Far Side islands where ghostly figures linger and the land swallows secrets whole. A devastating algae outbreak is slowly destroying the landscape they love, but government plans to deal with the crisis by flooding the lough would force them back to the Mainland for the first time in fifty years. When a young anthropologist arrives for field research, the Connollys wonder if this ambitious academic might be the answer to all their problems. Can they keep the Ark from revealing too much of its past?

Written with dark humor and a distinctive Northern voice, Few and Far Between is a novel about family and memory, toxic masculinity and modern womanhood, and the legacy of trauma that offers an illuminating look into the history of a complex place.