The harsh conditions on the tiny island of San Miguel are both denigrated and praised by two families trying to survive there—one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s. Barbara Caruso's performance champions the perspectives of the women who struggled at sheep ranching while coping with family, weather, and isolation. Despite her expert forays into their emotional upheavals, Caruso’s voice just does not convey youth of the mid-30s or teen heroines. She expresses well Marantha's (1888) petulant, spiteful, and prudish emotions, which occasionally melt into bored complacency. In contrast, Elise (1930) embraces the adventure and the island's natural beauty, but her youthful vigor and appreciative attitude is lost in Caruso's interpretation. Boyle infuses this historical novel with fine period detail and imaginative insights into these strong characters. A.W. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Theatrical as he appears in those outrageous shirts and jackets, in his fiction Boyle never steals the spotlight from his characters, from what they're wrestling with. His previous novel, When the Killing's Done (2011), took place on the Channel Islands off the coast of California and managed to make the complex issue of environmental reclamation tremendously exciting. His new novel, San Miguel, is a kind of prequel that again takes place on one of the Channel Islands, but the story's tone and pace are entirely different. Instead of violently dramatizing a contemporary debate, San Miguel is an absorbing work of historical fiction based on the lives of two real families who resided on San Miguel Island in the 19th and 20th centuries.
—Ron Charles

On New Year’s Day 1888, the ailing Marantha Waters sails across San Francisco Bay to remote San Miguel Island with her second husband and adopted daughter in hopes that the fresh air will restore her health. Marantha and her family, city folk by nature, risk the last of her inheritance on a farm lashed by wind and rain; removed from the pleasant distractions of late Victorian society and thrust into primitive living conditions, the Waters find themselves left with little to do but discover the strengths and weaknesses in themselves and in each other. Decades later during the Depression, Elise and Herbie Lester take over the farm and undergo their own transformations. Ripe with exhaustively researched period detail, Boyle’s epic saga of struggle, loss, and resilience (after When the Killing’s Done) tackles Pacific pioneer history with literary verve. The author subtly interweaves the fates of Native Americans, Irish immigrants, Spanish and Italian migrant workers, and Chinese fishermen into the Waters’ and the Lesters’ lives, but the novel is primarily a history of the land itself, unchanging despite its various visitors and residents, and as beautiful, imperfect, and unrelenting as Boyle’s characters. Agent: Georges Borchardt. (Sept.)

Praise for San Miguel
 
 

“Mesmerizing and elegiac…the star of the book is the island itself, San Miguel, in all its glorious barrenness…the island is entirely cut off from civilization for weeks or months at a time. Boyle skillfully captures that tension-filled quietude in the pared-down, mundane details of clearing, cooking, caring for livestock and enduring the tedium of unchanging days…it is a brave stylistic choice that pays off, allowing the reader a visceral experience of what life was like at that time.” —Tatjana Soli, The New York Times Book Review

“An absorbing work of historical fiction based on the lives of two real families who resided on San Miguel island in the 19th and 20th centuries…the intensity of Boyle’s narrative never lets it flag…San Miguel lures you away by yourself, off to a quiet, lonely place, and makes you think about how lives play out and then pass across the natural world.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A saga of women, three women brought to the island by men…Boyle has carved out a beautiful, damp, atmospheric novel, sharp and exacting…[his] spirited novels are a reckoning with consequence laced with humor, insight, and pathos.” —Terry Tempest Williams, The San Francisco Chronicle

“Although his sentences are vivid and vigorous, and his observations are, as always, uncannily precise, the reader is aware not so much of the writer as of the three stalwart women whose rich stories he tells.” —The Atlantic

“Throughout his career, Boyle has shown a fascination with remote, forgotten places as a kind of stage where various shadings of the American character are revealed…As always, he fills his pages with wonderfully precise character studies and lush descriptions of the physical landscape.” —Hector Tobar, The Los Angeles Times

“While the prose remains as exuberant and biting as ever, Boyle has stripped away every trace of his landmark irony to stunning effect…he never suggests that [the Lesters] – or any of these people – deserved their fate. In the past, Boyle has moved characters around like puppets to score satirical points. In San Miguel, he sets them free.” —Jennifer Reese, National Public Radio

“A book about the fallacy of more, of ownership, of second starts…Boyle is one of the most stylish, electric writers around. Here, though, he puts away the razzle-dazzle of his tool kit to write his way into the heart and mind of a woman with diminishing horizons.” —John Freeman, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The story of two families who lived on the windiest and wildest of the Channel Islands…the layering of these isolated lives, the archeology of human habitation, the different responses to self-sufficiency make this one of the most satisfying novels in Boyle’s canon.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Magazine

“In T.C. Boyle’s San Miguel, two strong women generations apart are seduced and mistreated by the same powerful entity – not a man but a starkly beautiful, barely inhabited island off the California coast…Boyle portrays the heartbreaking toll San Miguel takes on these couples in a novel as beguiling as the island itself.” —O The Oprah Magazine

This latest novel from Boyle (The Women; When the Killing's Done) portrays two families living and working on barren San Miguel Island off the coast of California. In 1888 Marantha Waters leaves her comfortable life on mainland California and moves out to San Miguel with her adopted daughter and husband, a steely Civil War veteran convinced that he'll have success sheep ranching on the island. Marantha is seriously ill, but instead of breathing the clean, restorative air she expected, she must live in a drafty, moldy shack in a damp environment where the sun rarely shines. Years later, in 1930, Elise Lester, newly wed at 38, moves to San Miguel with her husband, Herbie, a World War I veteran. Though Herbie has his highs and lows, they are happy, and they have two daughters. The outside world learns of their pioneering ways, and they achieve a celebrity Herbie hopes will translate into additional income. Then World War II arrives, and with war in the Pacific, their insular island location may no longer be a refuge. VERDICT In this absorbing work, Boyle does an excellent job of describing the desperation and desolation of life on the island. Readers can almost feel the cold and damp seeping into their bones. [See Prepub Alert, 3/5/12.]—Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA

The harsh conditions on the tiny island of San Miguel are both denigrated and praised by two families trying to survive there—one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s. Barbara Caruso's performance champions the perspectives of the women who struggled at sheep ranching while coping with family, weather, and isolation. Despite her expert forays into their emotional upheavals, Caruso’s voice just does not convey youth of the mid-30s or teen heroines. She expresses well Marantha's (1888) petulant, spiteful, and prudish emotions, which occasionally melt into bored complacency. In contrast, Elise (1930) embraces the adventure and the island's natural beauty, but her youthful vigor and appreciative attitude is lost in Caruso's interpretation. Boyle infuses this historical novel with fine period detail and imaginative insights into these strong characters. A.W. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

The prolific author's latest is historical, not only in period and subject matter, but in tone and ponderous theme. The 14th novel from Boyle returns to the Channel Islands off the coast of California, a setting which served him so well in his previous novel (When the Killing's Done, 2011). Some of the conflicts are similar as well--man versus nature, government regulation versus private enterprise--but otherwise this reads more like a novel that is a century or more old, like a long lost work from the American naturalist school of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, both of whom saw mankind caught in mechanistic forces and nature as something other than the Eden of innocence so often romanticized. The novel tenuously connects the stories of two families who move, 50 years apart, to the isolation of the title island, in order to tend to a sheep ranch. For Marantha Waters, the symbolically fraught pilgrimage with her husband and daughter in 1888--on "New Year's Day, the first day of her new life, and she was on an adventure...bound for San Miguel Island and the virginal air Will insisted would make her well again"--is one of disillusionment and determination. Even the passage of time feels like a loss of innocence: "The days fell away like the skin of a rotten fruit"; "The next day sheared away like the face of a cliff crashing into the ocean and then there was another day and another." The ravages of the natural world (and their own moral natures) take their toll on the family, who are belatedly succeeded in the 1930s by a similar one, as newlyweds anticipate their move west as "the real life they were going into, the natural life, the life of Thoreau and Daniel Boone, simple and vigorous and pure." Reinforcing their delusions is national press attention, which made much of their "pioneering, that is, living like the first settlers in a way that must have seemed romantic to people inured to the grid of city streets and trapped in the cycle of getting and wanting and getting all over again." What may seem to some like paradise offers no happy endings in this fine novel.