The highly anticipated novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Pull of the Stars and Room’Haven is everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. This is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.’ – Maggie O’Farrell, author of Hamnet’Combines pressure-cooker intensity and radical isolation, to stunning effect.’ – Margaret Atwood via TwitterThree men vow to leave the world behind them and start anew . . . In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks – young Trian and old Cormac – he travels down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. Their extraordinary landing spot is now known as Skellig Michael. But in such a place, far from all o