On the Island
SynopsisPlot
Sixteen-year-old T.J. Callahan has no desire to go anywhere. With his cancer in remission, all he wants is to get back to his normal life. But his parents insist that he spend the summer catching up on the school he missed while he was sick. Anna Emerson is a thirty-year-old English teacher who has been worn down by the cold Chicago winters and a relationship that’s going nowhere. To break up the monotony of everyday life, she jumps at the chance to spend the summer on a tropical island tutoring T.J. Anna and T.J. board a private plane headed to the Callahans’ summer home, but as they fly over the Maldives’ twelve hundred islands, the unthinkable happens: their plane crashes in shark-infested waters. They make it to shore, but soon discover they’re stranded on an uninhabited island.
Story
About this book
Anna Emerson, a thirty-year-old English teacher from Chicago, agrees to spend a summer tutoring a teenager named T.J. Callahan at his family's rental in the Maldives. T.J. is almost seventeen and recently in remission from cancer. He would rather stay home with his friends, but his parents want him to catch up on the schoolwork he missed during treatment. The two are traveling by seaplane across the Indian Ocean when the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack and the aircraft crashes into shark-filled waters.
Anna and T.J. reach the shore of an uninhabited island and quickly face the practical demands of survival: finding drinkable water, building shelter, starting fire, and securing food. Days stretch into weeks and then months with no rescue. Tropical storms, marine hazards, and the lingering threat of T.J.'s illness returning add pressure to their situation. As time passes, the age gap between tutor and student shifts in significance as T.J. grows older on the island.
The novel was first self-published by Tracey Garvis Graves before becoming a New York Times bestseller. Its setting draws on the geography of the Maldives, an archipelago of roughly twelve hundred islands spread across the Indian Ocean southwest of India.
