Desolation Island

As the twentieth century draws to a close, a container ship heads for Punta Arenas, on the Straits of Magellan at Chile's southern tip. On board is Oliver Griffin, a Spaniard of Irish origin obsessed with invisibility. In the city's museum, Griffin seeks out the automaton he has seen his grandparents embracing in a honeymoon photograph. This fearsome metal warrior is a surviving relic of a proposed robotic army, commissioned by Philip II of Spain to guard the strait against the English. Griffin has long been fascinated by islands, and spends his life drawing maps of Desolation Island, where the Magellan Strait meets the Pacific. It was here that the automaton was discovered by a grieving woman scouring the archipelago for the bodies of her shipwrecked husband and son. Griffin relates the story of his life and travels while plunging through the streets of Funchal, Madeira. With a host of characters both real and imaginary, touches of Homer, Melville and Sebald, Automaton sets countless stories spinning around its central axis u the extraordinary automaton. Taking in sixteenth-century wizardry, court politics, the modern shipping industry, the cinematic version of The Invisible Man and personal letters and family photographs, this mesmerising, original novel is a testament to man's insatiable desire for knowledge. Spanning four full centuries of adventure, Automaton is a classic seafaring tale, striking at the heart of that eternal mystery: our obsession with the sea, as terrible as it is irresistible.