GULL ISLAND

A chilling story, told by a young woman, alone on an island in Georgian Bay where loneliness, explosive memories, bad weather, and terrifying dreams invade her mind during three days and nights. Slowly she comes to believe that some of her dreams may not be dreams, that there is someone else here, someone who wishes her harm

It's early April, the ice is barely gone, when Jude comes to the family cottage at her mother's bidding to find her father's will. Being alone brings back frightening memories of cottage times, most of them around her father's penchant for killing things – ducks, squirrels, porcupines, beavers, crows, Scoop, the family dog, and maybe a child He had an obsessive hatred of everything he deemed useless.
Jude's alcohol-fueled need to know whether she had been loved as a child leads her to search through old photographs and old memories. The sense of not being alone begins to weigh on her, an awareness that this place may be haunted by more than the past. Eva, her mother's friend, a shadowy presence at the family cottage, her jealous sister, Gina, whose dead child keeps invading Jude's nightmares, her distant mother who now has dementia, but most of all her father who had suddenly disappeared, all infest Jude's increasingly confused mind.
A storm takes her boat, and Jude starts to fear for her life and her sanity. Then she finds an open gun-case Do ghosts kill people?
A novel of psychological suspense in the vein of Death in Her Hands and The Winter People, Gull Island is a rich and addictive read.

ANNA PORTER's most recent book is Deceptions, a savvy art-world thriller with a strong, independent heroine. She is the author of five non-fiction books: her memoir In Other Words; Buying a Better World; The Ghosts of Europe, winner of the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing; Kasztner's Train, winner of the 2007 Writers' Trust Non-fiction Award and the Jewish Book Award for Non-fiction; and The Storyteller. She has written four other novels: Hidden Agenda, Mortal Sins, The Bookfair Murders, and The Appraisal, and her books have been published internationally. She has written numerous articles for magazines and newspapers on a broad range of topics ranging from Israel, the Palestinians, Hungary, and Central Europe, to cultural xenophobia and anti-Semitism. She was the founder and publisher of Key Porter Books.

https://www.annaporter.ca/