Winner of the 2018 Carnegie Medal, Geraldine McCaughrean's Where the World Ends is a gripping tale, set in 1727, about 12 men and boys clinging to life after being abandoned on a sheer vertical outcrop of rock in the frigid Atlantic ocean.
Birds are the lifeblood of the 100 or so residents of Hirta island in the remote Scottish archipelago of St. Kilda. Every summer, a group of men and boys is dropped off at Warrior Stac, a steep rock column four miles from Hirta. For a few weeks, they live in inhospitable crevices and caves, descending on ropes from cliffs to harvest birds. Waterfowl like puffins, gannets, guillemots and storm petrels provide them with food, fuel and feathers for the winter ahead. At night, the caves are lit only by "the rigid oily little bodies of dead storm petrels threaded through with tarry wicks." While Quill, one of the older boys, is glad to help provide, he has pangs this year, knowing that Murdina, the young visiting teacher from the mainland who has "disturbed" his thoughts since her arrival, will have gone home by the time the fowling party returns.
To their growing dismay, though, weeks go by with no returning boat. When a devout young boy named Euan has a vision that the end of the world has come and everyone but them has been taken up to heaven, some in the group panic. Others refuse to believe, and focus on surviving and signaling for help. As the summer warmth fades, the personalities of each man and boy come into sharper focus. "Sanctimonious" Col Cane, church sexton, barn cleaner and gravedigger, appoints himself temporary minister. Older boy Kenneth's cruel bullying grows even more hateful. And Quill's innate kindness pulls the boys back from the terror of their situation again and again. To maintain sanity and give structure to the days, Quill assigns titles to the boys: Keeper of Music, Keeper of Memories, Keeper of Days. The others name Quill Keeper of Stories. The boys and men have been well trained in their austere subsistence on Hirta: in a landscape marked by its stark uninhabitability, where no tree grows and rope is a precious commodity handed down from father to son, storytelling casts flickers of light onto the residents' grim days: "When life is harsh, everyday-ordinary is to be cherished."
Based on a true story, Where the World Ends stuns with its dark narrative and haunting visual imagery: "Around them on every crevice of the rock walls, headless petrels burned, the wicks encircled by haloes of flame, as though a band of skinny little angels was peering down at them." Including illuminating backmatter, like a glossary, and an illustrated list of the birds of 18th-century St. Kilda, McCaughrean's (The White Darkness; Peter Pan in Scarlet) work explores what happens when the everyday-ordinary turns disastrously extraordinary. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: In this unforgettable Carnegie Medal-winning YA novel, a dozen boys and men struggle to survive when they are stranded on a remote rock outcrop in 18th-century Scotland.