Islands emerge in novels and poems as mythical, seductive places; they are separate from the mainland in a way that could be a punishment or an escape, or sometimes both. They are places of nostalgia and longing, where we may be stuck, whether by shipwreck or bad weather or imprisonment—or sometimes some strange desire. They may be almost fantastical destinations that we long for and romanticize, by virtue of seeing them on the horizon as some distant shore; we think of them as separate from life, and yet their reality may often be a microcosm of all we seek to escape. Article continues after advertisement In my novel The Colony , the narrator Lena travels to an island retreat off the coast of Scotland in an attempt to disappear from her life, and also, she hopes, to recover from it. What she finds seems at first to be the home and sense of belonging she has always longed for.…