The Isle Of Youth

In The Isle of Youth, Laura Van den Berg explores the lives of women who are mired in secrecy and deception. Ranging from the inscrutability of a marriage to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, these stories are linked by mystery and by women who are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless—who will do what it takes to survive.

The characters in these stories share a sense of bewilderment, the sensation of having become lost in the mysteries of the self and the world at large, that seems at once entirely singular and utterly familiar.