The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley

Emma Sloley’s The Island of Last Things is a haunting, lyrical exploration of love, loss, and ethical ambiguity in a world teetering on ecological collapse. Set on a near-future Alcatraz Island, now home to the last functioning zoo on Earth, the novel charts a quietly devastating path through a landscape where most wildlife has been lost, and human desperation clings to what remains. Through the eyes of Camille, a young zookeeper who has known no other world, Sloley paints a stark yet strangely tender portrait of survival, longing, and moral reckoning.

The novel opens within the tightly controlled confines of the Alcatraz Zoo, where Camille cares for the remaining animals with precision and affection. She prefers the company of her charges (a jaguar, some chimpanzees, a few frogs) to that of other humans. That changes with the arrival of Sailor, a new zookeeper from Paris, whose charisma and conviction quickly begin to unsettle Camille’s routine. Sailor introduces the idea of a hidden sanctuary, a place beyond the crumbling systems of control, where animals might still roam free. As the two form a tenuous bond, the line between idealism and delusion begins to blur.

Sloley’s writing is elegant and spare, often poetic, and quietly immersive. Her prose echoes the novel’s melancholic tone: a sense of fading light, of things precious and irretrievably lost. The setting is beautifully imagined with sterile laboratories and crumbling walls standing in stark contrast to the emotional richness of Camille’s inner world. There’s a compelling irony in locating the last zoo on Alcatraz, a former prison, where both animals and humans seem confined by their ideals and their histories.

However, for all its strengths, the novel’s worldbuilding feels frustratingly thin at times. Hints of a “blight” and references to societal collapse abound, but the scope remains narrow. Readers looking for a detailed account of the world beyond Alcatraz may feel underfed, as the novel chooses introspection over exposition. This limited lens works thematically but occasionally undermines the story’s plausibility.

The relationship between Camille and Sailor is both the book’s emotional core and its most divisive element. Camille’s naiveté and blind trust in Sailor’s increasingly suspect promises can strain believability. While their dynamic is written with care, Sailor’s motivations become opaque, and the emotional manipulation at play feels too obvious at times. Still, their bond, flawed and complex, adds emotional weight to the novel’s final twist, a conclusion that is both shocking and bleakly inevitable.

Despite its grim premise, the novel is not without hope. It is a story about holding on to the possibility of change, even when that hope is fragile and perhaps illusory. In Camille’s quiet devotion, and in the persistent presence of life amid extinction, Sloley locates something enduring.

The Island of Last Things is a provocative, moving read that lingers long after the final page. It may not satisfy every reader’s appetite for post-apocalyptic detail, but its emotional depth and moral complexity make it a standout entry in the slow dystopia genre. An elegy for what we are losing, and a question mark over what we might still save.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Text Publishing