“Robinson is at his expansive best, reaching into a fraught American moment while retaining his gift for creating endearing characters...I was enthralled from first page to last, and couldn’t wait to get back to the island.”
—Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys, The One-in-a-Million Boy, and How to Read a Book
“In Lewis Robinson’s riveting new novel The Islanders, his eighteen-year-old protagonists are…brave and smart and decent and resourceful. Also, wildly entertaining. Reader, you’ll enjoy every minute of their company.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool
"The Islanders is at once an engrossing story and a timely, urgent warning: what will happen when the one percent decide to pull up the rope ladder behind them?” —Kate Christensen, author of The Astral, The Last Cruise, and Welcome Home, Stranger
“Robinson has written a first-rate, often lyrical page-turner that is, at heart, a coming-of-age story, character-driven and suspenseful...Yet the triumph of this book is its misfit teens who band together, demanding the truth from the Club’s leaders and refusing to go along with their deceit and lies. By the end, Robinson has taken readers—and his characters—on an emotional rollercoaster. We leave solidly cheering on these recruits.”—Joan Silverman, Portland Press Herald
"With an impeccable sense of timing and razor-sharp depictions of character, Lewis Robinson takes the reader through incidents that are too intriguing to resist; funny, unexpected, and always oddly poignant, this storyteller has a voice that pulls you right in." —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge
"Walt McNamara and his (mostly) good-hearted peers find themselves navigating somewhere between Lord of the Flies and a group of relentless motivational speakers. Robinson takes 'rites of passage' to new levels. The Islanders is one, great, unputdownable
novel." —George Singleton, author of The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs
"As a mother of sons, I often find myself wondering what is going to happen to boys who are good, or trying to be good, or learning what is good? Reading Lewis Robinson’s The Islanders, I found moving clarity. His Walt McNamara is the young male narrator of our moment: Walt’s journey from a culture of toxic masculinity to a remote Maine island where he discovers his own brand of tonic masculinity is so sensitively, acutely, and bravely drawn, you will never forget him."—Caitlin Shetterly, author of Pete and Alice in Maine
“Following a group of high school oddballs shunted to a Maine island for a 'leadership' program, the novel is an inventive and consistently surprising update to Lord of the Flies for the United States. And it’s a credit to Robinson that the teenagers at the center of the novel sound and feel like real teens — it’s a voice most adult authors struggle to capture, but he has knocked it out of the park. You won’t soon forget Walt, Aubrey or Tess, and they all make the book tough to put down until you’re through.”—Josh Christie, The Portland Press Herald
"Accomplished... lean and sure-handed. [Robinson] is a keen observer of truths about place...and about people, too." —Boston Sunday Globe
"Robinson balances Walt’s fraught and tender coming of age — his loving relationship with his mom; trying to understand parents’ choices, failures, flaws; the errors made as one comes into one’s own; and he’s especially good in capturing the heated pangs of a big crush — with thriller action. There’s pleasurable intimacy with the landscape... Robinson nails the prickly fear-pleasure of moving through woods at night." — Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
"Robinson is tremendously adept at building menace slowly, quietly, and the shocks as these stories unfold is one of their greatest pleasures." —Esquire
