Mother Sea is an evocative fantasy-tinged novel about an island community facing extinction. BooksfromScotland got in touch with author Lorraine Wilson to ask her to tell us how she created her fictional world.

Mother Sea
By Lorraine Wilson
Published by Fairlight Books

Building An Island 

My new book, Mother Sea, was my first time inventing a country. It is a real world story set on a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean. I’m hardly the first author to create new land for the purposes of storytelling, in fact I am writing this just days after a friend and fellow Scottish author, Nicholas Binge celebrated the publication of Ascension – a book about a mysterious new mountain appearing in the Pacific Ocean. But where in Nick’s book the island is an unknown threat, my island needed to feel like home. Despite a perhaps unfamiliar setting, I wanted it to feel both very real and beloved. Why? Because writers are mean, and I wanted the threats to my island to hit the reader as hard as they do my characters! But also because I wanted, in Mother Sea, to be drawing lines of connection and commonality between me and you, whoever you are. I wanted to speak to the things that we share – the climate fears and the familial ties, the familiarity with grief and the need to belong.  

So how do you go about building an island? There were two strands to my research. The first was rooted in my ecologist background – I simply approached it as an exercise in island biogeography. If an island existed roughly here east of the Seychelles, what might its geology be (I took liberties with tectonic faultlines!), and what species might have colonised it? And of those, which would have become endemic? This involved a lot of looking at field guides and photos from my time in the region, and sighing wistfully!  

This island also had to be able to support a small community before the establishment of trade though, so I tweaked the geography a little to enable a degree of agriculture. I looked at the crops grown on other small islands and the culinary uses of regional plants, until I was happy my ship-wrecked ancestors would not starve. Here then was an island ready and waiting for its people.  

But before I could give the island its people, I wanted first to understand those commonalities I mentioned. To look at all the ways islanders around the world are unique and yet also share similar veins of mythology and culture. I’ve been lucky enough to live, work in, or visit a lot of remote island or coastal areas, from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego. I’ve done bird transects through semi-desert limestone karst and Shetland’s peat bogs, I’ve sat in the dark counting nesting sea turtles on white sand beaches and returning storm petrels on rocky shores. I’ve lived in tents (with additional pythons in one instance), warden’s cottages, bothies and raffia-roofed school huts; speaking to people in my second language, my third and fourth and fifth in rapidly descending degrees of fluency, and still managed to feel thoroughly at sea with Orcadian.  

So how did this help me? Well, it gave me a starting point to an awful lot more research on island mythologies, the history of colonialism in island nations, the gender roles of multi-gendered societies, farming adaptations to coastal ecozones, and more. And through all of this, two common strands began to appear, neither of them very surprising: First, the prominence of the sea in mythology – goddess figures or trickster shapeshifters like Scotland’s own Sea Mither and kelpies – beings that encompass the dual nature of the sea for the communities that depend on it as both their richest resource and greatest danger. And second, communalism over individualism. When your lives are lived at the mercy of the sea, you need one another, and so societies shape themselves around a core of mutualism and of individuals adapting themselves to the roles their communities need. It’s a pattern still evident in Scottish island communities, I think, as well as in many of the other islands I have known.  

These two aspects formed the frame around which I grew my island society. Its initial seed was from the tragic history of a real island called Tromelin where a French trade ship carrying enslaved people was wrecked, and, to cut a long story short, the French crew escaped and the previously-enslaved survivors lived for another fifteen years before rescue. I asked myself what might have happened to a similar ship wrecked on a different island that was not rescued, but instead flourished. With the sea as a goddess and community as the heart of society, with the wider tides of colonialism sweeping the region and the seasonalities of seabird eggs, mangoes, storms … how might this group of people grow into a nation?  

I decided very early on that I wanted my society to be matrilineal, and the normalising of a third gender was never even in question. So they evolved into a people led by Mothers – in the form of the sea and their elders, taught by the Sacere – their history keepers, and watched over by their ancestors entombed in the cliffs above. They are a community who understands that they are only a part of the island, as important as the hermit crabs and the sooty terns, less wise than the endlessly curious geckos. But that they are also a part of the world, feeling the tug-of-war of the benefits the outside can offer even whilst they suffer the climate toll exacted by the outsider’s greed. 

It’s a far cry from North Uist or Papa Westray, but I hope that the worries and dreams of my islanders resonate. We are not as far removed from the issues they face as we might think, and perhaps Mother Sea might bring us that tiny bit closer still.  

Mother Sea by Lorraine Wilson is published by Fairlight Books, priced £14.99.