The Lightkeepers

The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni is a literary mystery novel about a nature photographer named Miranda who travels to the remote Farallon Islands off the coast of California to document the wildlife of the region. Miranda is planning to have a one year residency on the island, but in the first days of her arrival, she is assaulted by one of the island's few residents. Days later, her assailant is found dead, perhaps murdered by another of the island's residents. The book attempts to solve the mystery of Abby's attack and her attackers subsequent death, while also dealing with Abby's healing after her assault, the importance of nature and the natural world, grieving, and recovery.
 
The book opens when wildlife photographer Miranda arrives on the Farallon Islands. A remote archipelago of rocky islands off the coast of California, the place is beautiful, desolate, and closed to the public. There are no human inhabitants other than a handful of biologists, who work and live in a small cabin on the island, which they share. Miranda gains access to the islands, and to life in this cabin, when she applies for a one year residency as a nature photographer. Her mission is to capture the untouched beauty of the crumbling, rocky coastline, the flocks of birds and meandering sharks, and anything else that catches her eye.
 
Miranda likes to be alone, and so isn't concerned at all about the lack of human contact on the island, or her separation from the conveniences of the mainland. As soon as she arrives she falls in love with the islands and their wild inhabitants, including flocks of birds so enormous and volatile that sometimes the biologists have to wear hard hats to avoid being attacked from above. The wildlife on the island is stunning, but also deadly – a trio of sharks called the sisters swims just off the coast, and the region has been called, historically, the Islands of the Dead.
 
This name proves more accurate than Miranda imagined when, only a few days after her arrival, she is assaulted by one of the biologists living in the cabin with her. She is shaken by the experience, and tries to find solace in the natural world around her, as she has done for her whole life. Only a few days later, however, the entire cabin is shaken when the same biologist who assaulted Miranda turns up dead, and nobody is quite sure if it was natural causes or human hands that lead to his demise.
 
Though it is propelled forward by a central mystery of a classic variety – a locked room, a limited number of possible suspects – the book is structured more as Miranda's travelogue, as she recovers from the assault and wonders about the death of her assailant. She is deeply embedded in the natural life around her, studying birds and other creatures up close, and photographing her way through the grief of so much violence in such a short span.
 
At times, Miranda is an unreliable narrator, and even her testimony about the events that transpired is questioned. Ultimately, however, Miranda's beautiful documentation of healing, grief, violence, and nature is a testament to the power of the natural world and the resilience of the human spirit. For Miranda, nature is both a healing and a violent force, something to trust and also something to watch carefully, because it acts without sympathy or warning.
 
Abby Geni is the author of three books – The Last Animal, The Lightkeepers, and The Wildlands. The Lightkeepers was Geni's first novel, and the winner of the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction and the first Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction. She has also received recognition for her short stories; she was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the Glimmertrain Short Story contest, among other honors. Geni received an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and received an Iowa Fellowship. She is based in Chicago, and works at StoryStudio Chicago as a core faculty member.