Enchanted Islands is an unusual memoir. Documenting Laura Coffey’s unconventional pandemic experience, it depicts Coffey spending six months travelling the Mediterranean, visiting the islands believed to have inspired Homer’s Odyssey. Her decision to start this journey was prompted by reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the epic at a time when she needed to find an escape. As for many people, lockdown limited her ability to interact and connect with other people – Coffey faced heartbreak following a breakup, and a father with terminal cancer, whose vulnerability to the virus meant he couldn’t be visited safely.

“It is occasionally uplifting, often beautiful, and thoroughly engaging, but it did leave me in tears at least once”

While her adventure broadly differs from how most of us spent this period, the novel is shocking in the apparent lack of acknowledgement of the global situation. This absence does not negate that all travel undertaken was conducted in line with the regulations of the time: masks were worn, hands were sanitised, tests were taken, and most dining took place outside. Despite the regularity of these ordeals, these details are sparse in the novel. COVID provides the story’s backdrop, but is not central to the tale itself; the changes are routine, becoming as mundane as showers and laundry. Instead, Coffey’s focus remains firmly on her personal troubles, with lockdown becoming almost incidental. This refreshing angle allows the book to retain its poignancy and relevance even as the pandemic shifts from a current crisis to a terrible event in our collective memories.

Throughout, Coffey references the Odyssey in her choices of islands, occasional quotes, and the discovery of parallels between Homer’s narrative journey and hers, but the story is fundamentally her own, not an attempt to emulate Homer. The epic provides a reference point for the events of the book, giving it a foundation in the past, while still sitting firmly in the present, and looking to the future. Each reference is highly personal, allowing the memoir to remain almost uncomfortably intimate; we are shown everything from weddings and funerals, to familial fights and crises of identity, with unapologetic frankness, despite her tale’s mythological inspiration. In elegant but plain-reading prose, Coffey describes her time on the islands, the natural sights that helped her connect to the world around her, the people that helped her connect to others, and the exercises that helped her connect to her own body.

“When dealing with a personal journey to work through grief rather than a literal journey home, a complete ending was never likely to happen”

Enchanted Islands is not an easy-going beach read. It’s occasionally uplifting, often beautiful, and thoroughly engaging, but it did leave me in tears at least once. The conclusion is bittersweet at most. Everything does not, exactly, work out in the end — there is no satisfying final scene in which the author finally returns to herself, rejuvenated and with a greater appreciation for life and the magic of the world around her. Reality is messier than myth — plots do not move in a linear fashion, and they are not divided neatly into twenty-four books. When dealing with a personal journey to work through grief rather than a literal journey home, a complete ending was never likely to happen.

Coffey’s experience may not have been something I found hugely relatable, but there were moments where I felt real kinship with the author, in a way I imagine many people will. Myths and stories have always been a way in which people find escape, feel seen, and show appreciation for the beautiful world we inhabit. The Odyssey is one of our oldest stories, and its imagining of a “complicated man” rings true for many of us. Coffey stresses that there is enchantment and healing to be found in both myth and reality. So long as we have people we love, heartbreak and grief will inevitably strike, but by interacting with stories, the world, other people, and ourselves, we can do our best to find our way home when it does.

Enchanted Islands is now available in hardback in retailers, online and in-store.