Book
The Island of the Day Before
First published 1994
The Pacific, 1643. Roberto della Griva survives a shipwreck and reaches an abandoned vessel anchored near an island that he cannot reach because he cannot swim. He believes the island lies beyond the international date line and therefore occupies the previous day.
Alone aboard the ship, Roberto reconstructs his earlier life during the Thirty Years’ War and his recruitment into Cardinal Mazarin’s search for a practical method of calculating longitude. Memory, imagined rivalry and scientific speculation merge as he tries to understand the vessel, the island and whether time itself can be crossed.
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