Mother Sea

LoveReading Says

Set on “an ocean-speck atoll in Britain’s shrunken empire, far east of the Seychelles”, Lorraine Wilson’s Mother Sea presents a moving, of-the-moment story of an island community under threat from the devastating effects of climate change.

Suffused in indigenous island culture against a backdrop of British colonialism, it fizzes with furious conflicts between “old ways” and outside influences through its protagonists’ gripping journeys from tragedy and grief to a new state of hope.

Scientist Sisi is immersed in monitoring the conditions that are wreaking devasting change on her remote Indian Ocean island community — rising seas coupled with plunging birth rates. Then, as a British administrator arrives on the island, Sisi is widowed and finds out she’s pregnant, just as the administrator and his band of outsiders try to persuade the islanders to give up their home.

Though an island elder states, “We shall listen to the British this morning, and Mother Sea shall listen also, she who sees everything and will guide us to the truth”, it’s clear Mother Sea will never guide them to leave.

Meanwhile, Sisi finds herself straddling two worlds — that of her ancestors, family and island community, and the sphere of modern-day science and medicine. As such, she’s torn by a terrible conflict — she feels “blasphemy searing her as if all the salt in her body had become needles”.

With the haunting, tangible presence of Mother Sea felt throughout, and an engaging subplot around an outsider battling his own ancestral conflicts, Mother Sea is a stirring, lyrical, thought-provoking feat. 

Joanne Owen

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