"Pure color " wrote Paul Gauguin to his wife, Mette, from the South Seas. "Everything must be sacrificed to it." In Off Island, novelist Lara Tupper imagines Gauguin--chasing new light, new color--ran away to a new island, a rugged outpost off the coast of Maine.
There, Gauguin leaves behind some paintings and letters, and maybe a child. A hundred years later, another Maine painter, Pete, finds himself torn between his muses--the sturdy, reliable Molly and the unhappy, peripatetic Karla--who promises to take him to other, newer islands.
Off Island captures the lure of the unknown and the pull of the familiar, and questions what it means to be loyal to one's art, one's family, and one's home.