Mondadori in the “Omnibus” series published The ghosts of the island (2024, original title Chimney Ghoststranslated by Luca Fusari) new novel by the American author John Grisham.
The writer, born in Jonesboro (Arkansas) on 8 February 1955, lives in Virginia and Mississippi and is universally recognized as the king of the legal thriller.
“I have a story, Mercer. Maybe the best ever.”
Bruce Cable, owner of a book shop on Camino Island “Bay Books”, tells Mercer Mann, a young writer and newlywed, the story of Dark Isle, a desert island, one of those small barrier islands between Florida and Georgia , where no one has ever built us, less than five kilometers long and one and a half wide, with pristine beaches. a kind of ghost island.
Towards the mid-eighteenth century, a community of slaves fleeing from Georgia, which was then governed by the English, settled there. Florida, however, was under the Spanish who, while not banning slavery, gave asylum to fugitives from Georgia and the British colonies. A long feud arose, because Georgia wanted the slaves back, but the Spanish denied it and protected them to annoy the English colonies.
Around 1760 a slave ship, returning from West Africa, was about to dock in Savannah, when a terrible cyclone arrived from the north, hit it and pushed it towards the south, seriously damaging it. She was a Virginia ship called the Venus, and she carried about four hundred slaves, packed like sardines. Many had already died during the journey. The conditions on board were unimaginable, the Venus sank about a mile off the coast of Cumberland Island. The slaves had shackles on their hands and feet and almost all of them drowned. However, someone managed to cling to the wreck and drifted to Dark Island, or Dark Isle, as she was later renamed, because at that date she still didn’t have a name. The survivors were brought to safety by fugitives from Georgia, who together founded a small community. In the more than two centuries that have passed since then they have died or left, and now the island is deserted.
Lovely Jackson, eighty years old, author of Dark Isle. Slave Island, and the last surviving descendant of Dark Isle, claims to be the sole owner of the island. But real estate speculators, similar to vultures, can’t wait to cement the island, scarring that portion of paradise forever. Lovely does not intend to sell the island, which she considers hallowed ground. Her ancestors are buried there. An ancestor of hers was on the Venus, her name was Nalla, a kind of African voodoo priestess. The real estate speculators have lawyers and they are a fierce bunch and they say there is no evidence that Lovely was born on the island. Bruce Cable, Mercer Mann and Steven Mahon, a lawyer expert in environmental battles, stand alongside Lovely trying to win a very tough battle.
“The request that ownership of the island be recognized was based on the legal principle of adverse possession. She and her ancestors had lived on Dark Isle “manifestly” and “notoriously,” without interference or interruption, for over two hundred years.”
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After The Fitzgerald Affair (2017) and The Last Story (2020), John Grisham brings the loyal reader back to Camino Island, reintroducing two captivating characters, Bruce Cable and Mercer Mann.
Racism, social injustice and corruption, themes dear to the man and the lawyer Grisham which in this novel are at the center of a compelling plot that highlights the contradictions of American society.
