Ellen Meeropol's Mosaic Novel 'Sometimes an Island' Asks 'What Comes After a Climate Disaster?'

In Sometimes An Island, author and former pediatric nurse practitioner Ellen Meeropol tells the story of a family’s escape from their burning village in Russia to seek refuge on a remote island off the coast of Maine. Ten-year-old Deborah and her father were forced to leave their shtetl and build a new life abroad after the Cossacks burnt down their home. Over a century later, their descendants are once again driven from their homes due to rising sea levels amid a global climate crisis. Set in the Penobscot Bay area in the years leading up to and following a major climate disaster, Meeropol’s sixth book is a mosaic novel told in many voices through several time periods. When asked how she became so involved in environmental and climate issues, Meeropol explained that her concern deepened after the birth of her first grandchild. “At that point I started really worrying about what the future might hold for her as she grew older, and so I joined a climate study group and the more I learned, the more I worried, and then I started writing about it because as a novelist you often write about the things that keep you up at night.”

After reading her novel, Meeropol hopes readers will become more mindful of the changes affecting our environment. “…I want people to think about what’s happening with the environment, I want people to think about migration and immigration and what it means that people all around the world are fleeing their homes not only because of climate change, but also because of famine and drought and hunger and war and violence, and these are big things in our world today… so I hope people will consider them, but I think that what fiction does best is to help us feel empathy for lives very different from our own, to help us see things from a different perspective, and that’s what I try to accomplish in my books.”