Off Island

"Pure color!" wrote Paul Gauguin to his wife, Mette, from the South Seas. "Everything must be sacrificed to it." In Off Island, novelist Lara Tupper imagines Gauguin-chasing new light, new color-ran away to a new island, a rugged outpost off the coast of Maine.

There, Gauguin leaves behind some paintings and letters, and maybe a child. And a hundred years later, another Maine painter, Pete, finds himself torn between his muses-the sturdy, reliable Molly and the unhappy, peripatetic Karla, who promises to take him to other, newer islands.

Off Island captures the lure of the unknown and the pull of the familiar, and questions what it means to be loyal to one's art, one's family and one's home.

Lara Tupper is also the author of A Thousand and One Nights (Harcourt/Untreed Reads), an autobiographical tale about breaking the trajectory of career-marriage-family, as well as her linked short story collection, Amphibians (Leapfrog Press, 2021), which was the winner of the Leapfrog Fiction Prize. Her short fiction was runner up for the 2019 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature; her prose has appeared in The Believer, Nowhere Magazine, Dogwood Journal, Epiphany and other literary publications. Born in Boothbay, Maine, Lara now writes, teaches, and performs in Western Massachusetts. A jazz/pop vocalist, her latest album is This Dance. Visit www.laratupper.com and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.