ALMOST ISLAND

Murphy’s novel offers a reflective, cleareyed reckoning with memory, war, and the fragile mechanics of love.

Leo Mulcahy, a recently retired physician and former combat medic, sets out on a long-anticipated trip to Vietnam with his wife, Claire, hoping to revisit the places that shaped his youth and to confront—carefully, deliberately—a war he has spent decades keeping at arm’s length. As they move from contemporary Saigon toward the rural interior, guided by a local interpreter with his own wartime history, Leo searches for Quan Loi, the now-vanished base camp where he once served. The journey unfolds against the backdrop of Leo’s recent medical diagnosis, his uneasy transition into retirement, and the emotional weight Claire carries as the sister of a medic killed during the war. What begins as a pilgrimage rooted in curiosity and unfinished history gradually becomes a test of endurance, forcing Leo to navigate memory, grief, professional identity, and the unsettling realization that neither our bodies nor our pasts remain fully under our control. The narrative alternates between the present-day journey and layered recollections from Leo’s life—his years as a young medic in Vietnam, his long marriage, his medical career, and the ethical failures that continue to haunt him. Murphy renders Vietnam with careful specificity, not as a static site of trauma but as a living place. Saigon’s noise and density clash with Leo’s remembered silence, while the rediscovery of Quan Loi underscores how easily physical history can disappear. “With the jungle slowly taking over, Quan Loi would soon vanish,” Leo observes, a line that captures the book’s persistent tension between erasure and remembrance. Running parallel to the external journey is the portrait of Leo and Claire’s marriage. The author renders Claire with precision and warmth—she’s practical, impatient with wasted time, deeply empathetic, and quietly decisive. Their relationship gives the book much of its emotional ballast, grounding the historical material in domestic reality.

As the book progresses, the focus turns increasingly inward. Letters, dreams, and professional memories interrupt the forward motion, revealing how Leo’s medical training—his reliance on probabilities, diagnoses, and rational frameworks—has shaped his understanding of the world and its failures. The recurring metaphor of “hoofbeats,” a lesson from medical school about assuming common causes before rare ones, becomes a lens through which the author examines moral blindness and hindsight. Leo’s reflections on bad judgment, both personal and professional, are among the book’s most unsettling moments, precisely because they resist easy absolution. The prose remains measured and controlled throughout, favoring clarity over flourishes. Moments of humor surface unexpectedly, often through irony or understated observation, providing relief without diminishing the book’s gravity. The pacing is deliberate, which occasionally demands patience, but the accumulation of details will reward close attention. Rather than building toward a single revelatory moment, the narrative gains force through repetition and return, mirroring the way memory itself works. Attentive to time’s passage, to the body’s betrayals, and to the ethical residue of past decisions, Murphy prioritizes restraint over spectacle. He offers no simple reckonings and no false comforts, only the steady illumination of a life examined honestly.

A penetrating novel that suggests lives are shaped less by events than by what remains after them.