There are strange lights in the darkness, evidence of a shadowy visitor, a dead seal, a missing watch, a deceased local, and the continuing non-appearance of boots ordered from the harbour shop. Soot and ashes, however, are soon joined by odd occurrences, their accumulation adding to a sense of dreamlike and dislocating foreboding. The cumulative impressions left by several generations had been obliterated in just a few short hours … Even things that are invisible can be reduced to soot and ashes.” Left alone again, Welin questions whether he has any future: “I felt as if I was walking through my house once more. She has plans to create a garden, an “ocean of emptiness”, but soon departs without explanation. His apparently feckless daughter Louise then arrives, their relationship fraught from the outset. Meanwhile he moves into a caravan and begins to become infatuated with a young journalist, Lisa Modin, who is interested in the story. Arson is suspected, and the police think him the likely culprit. He is self-contained and introspective, but his world changes when his house burns down one night. Welin lives alone on his small island off the coast of Sweden, his only regular visitor the postman Jansson. That earlier novel dealt with ageing and mortality, themes also central to this work. Henning Mankell, in his final novel, returns to the location of a previous book, Italian Shoes, and the same protagonist, retired orthopaedic surgeon Fredrik Welin. From Treasure Island to Lord of the Flies, they explore us as much as we explore them. Islands have a long association with literature, providing a setting for adventure, rebirth and danger. Muriel Spark played with this notion in her early novel, Robinson, where a human-shaped island begins to affect a group of castaways stranded there. “No man is an island”, the poet John Donne announced.

After the Fire by Will Hill