The Last Kings of Sark
A Novel
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy."
Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island and the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She's been hired for the summer to tutor a rich local boy named Pip. But when Jude arrives, the family is unsettling. Pip is awkward, overly literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.
Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something powerful starts to touch the three together.
But those strange, golden weeks on Sark can't last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything.Compelling, sensual, and lyrical, The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee is a tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from an extraordinary new writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After her graduation from St. Andrews in Scotland, a woman named Jude finds a summer job tutoring a 16-year-old boy on the tiny English Channel Island of Sark, where cars are illegal, the locals drive around on tractors, and feudalism existed until 2008. The Defoe family is as strange as the island: Eddy, the patriarch, is rarely home; his wife, Esme, almost never leaves her room and appears to subsist entirely on sparkling water; and their son, Pip, despite being a bright boy whose knowledge outstrips Jude's, has no intention of completing the college exams for which she is allegedly preparing him. Jude is immediately drawn to Sofi, the family's beautiful 19-year-old cook, and soon Jude, Sofi, and Pip are inseparable. Over the course of a magical summer, there's very little tutoring and not a lot of cooking, but plenty of bicycling, night swimming, wine drinking, and bonding, in ways none of them anticipated. A few years later, all three have fallen out of touch, but each still struggles to fully understand the ways the summer, and their friendship, changed the courses of their lives. Rankin-Gee's prose moves with a languid pace that vividly showcases Sark's as well as her characters' peculiarities. Though the plot meanders and the island is populated with stock characters, hidden surprises and a beautifully written, bittersweet ending pack a vivid emotional punch..
