Fans of Priest’s brilliant books will already be familiar with the Dream Archipelago, the chain of islands in which reality can behave however suits the author. Now Priest has written a gazetteer of those islands, and woven a fiendish set of stories about art and murder within the dry, alphabetical listing of information. For my tastes the information may be a little too dry; at his best CP plays brilliant games with the nature of fiction and the tricks that memory plays with narrators, but the shreds of connecting stories in The Islanders are a bit too diffuse for my taste. Favourite themes of unreliable memory and stage magic make appearances, and the thrymes will haunt my imagination for a long time, but I was left slightly unsatisfied, unsure what thread I had been meant to be pursuing. Newcomers to the Archipelago are advised to start with Priest’s masterpiece The Affirmation.