The Island

Spinalonga is a small island at the entrance of the Gulf of Elounda in eastern Crete. For most of its history it was a Venetian fortress; from 1903 to 1957 it was Greece’s last functioning leper colony. Today it is one of Crete’s most visited historical sites — accessible by small boat from the village of Elounda — and The Island has made it famous far beyond Greece.

Victoria Hislop visited Spinalonga and was haunted by what she saw: a complete, abandoned village, preserved almost intact since the colony closed in 1957. The houses, the church, the medical facilities, the coffee house — all standing, all empty. She began researching the lives of the people who had lived there, and discovered that the colony’s residents had built something that the word “colony” does not convey: a real community, with its own social hierarchy, its own commerce, its own love affairs and disputes and aspirations.

The novel follows four generations of the Petrakis family from their village of Plaka — directly across a narrow stretch of water from Spinalonga — through the decades when the island dominated their lives. The contemporary frame, in which a young British woman visits Crete and discovers her family’s connection to the island, serves as a portal into the historical story.

The Greek television adaptation in 2010 was watched by roughly half the population of Greece each week — a cultural phenomenon that confirmed Spinalonga’s place in the modern Greek imagination. The novel has sold over a million copies in the UK alone and introduced a generation of British tourists to eastern Crete.

Reading Guides

• Books About Greece: Essential Reading for Visitors and Hellenic Dreamers
• Best Historical Fiction Books of All Time

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Island apart: The Spinalonga leper colony is one of the most extraordinary historical sites in Greece — Hislop gives it the human depth it deserves; The four-generation family saga structure makes the novel compulsively readable across its historical sweep; The Cretan village of Plaka and the eastern Crete landscape are rendered with specific beauty; and The novel treats leprosy and stigma with dignity and historical accuracy. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Island give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Spinalonga was Europe’s last active leper colony, housing patients from 1903 to 1957 — within living memory. The island’s residents built a functioning community with its own shops, coffee houses, and social life despite their isolation. Leprosy stigma destroyed families and communities in 20th-century Crete in ways that the medical treatment of the disease did not immediately repair. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Victoria Hislop’s prose in The Island is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The contemporary framing device (the daughter visiting Crete) is less compelling than the historical sections. Some of the earlier historical sections are slightly schematic in characterisation. Readers who want literary challenge rather than warm storytelling may find it conventional. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers visiting Crete and eastern Crete; historical fiction lovers; anyone interested in the human stories behind extraordinary historical places.

The Greek Television Adaptation

When the Greek television adaptation of The Island — titled Το Νησί (To Nisi) — was broadcast in 2010, it became the most-watched programme in Greece in decades. Ratings figures suggested that approximately half the Greek population watched at least some episodes, and the adaptation’s success turned Spinalonga into one of the most visited sites in the country, with tourist numbers to the island near Elounda increasing dramatically in the years following.

The adaptation gave The Island a second life in its principal setting: a novel by a British author about a Greek historical site became, through its Greek television translation, a genuinely Greek cultural phenomenon. For Hislop, who has spoken extensively about her deep affection for Greece and particularly for Crete, this represented a form of recognition that commercial success in Britain alone could not have provided.

What Hislop Found at Spinalonga

The key to understanding The Island’s success is that Hislop did not simply research the leper colony — she found it deeply and specifically moving when she visited, and that response is embedded in every page. The preserved village on the island — intact because no one had reason to develop or demolish it — was genuinely haunting: the evidence of a community that had built a full social life under the most constraining imaginable circumstances, and had done so with a degree of dignity and mutual support that the word “colony” fails to convey.

The discovery that the Spinalonga residents had organised themselves into a functioning community — with a church that served the Greek Orthodox faithful, a coffee house, a commercial street, its own social hierarchy and love affairs — was the imaginative trigger for the novel. Hislop has said that she felt these people deserved to have their story told, and that The Island is, before it is anything else, that act of witness.

The Novel’s Legacy

The Island has sold more than five million copies worldwide and been translated into more than thirty languages. It transformed British tourism to eastern Crete: the boat crossing from Elounda to Spinalonga is now one of the most popular tourist activities in the region, and the village of Plaka — Hislop’s fictional name for Elounda village — is explicitly associated with the novel in tourist literature. The novel’s success made Hislop one of the most commercially successful British novelists of her generation and established the template — the dual-timeline structure, the Mediterranean historical setting, the family saga form — that she has used across all her subsequent work.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A richly warm historical novel that makes Spinalonga’s extraordinary story accessible to a general audience — and transforms a visit to Crete’s eastern end into a deeply felt encounter with living history.