Twinhood, Ghosts and Remote Italian Islands by Daisy Stephens, author of Island of the Lost

Who’s the clever one? The quiet one? The evil one?

These were all questions my twin sister and I were asked growing up, by friends, acquaintances, even teachers. Each one was not simply a question of who we were – of what we liked, or what we wanted to be when we grew up – but a question of who we were in relation to the other one.

My parents were always careful not to treat us as “the twins”. They didn’t dress us in the same clothes, and we were in different classes at school. But still, despite all this, we were treated as one being by many people.

Being a twin is, in my opinion, a uniquely weird thing. I have a best friend who I know thinks the same as me about virtually everything. We have an identical sense of

humour, and we can argue bitterly one minute and then be best friends the next. In some ways, it’s amazing. But it also creates a sort of identity crisis that I don’t know if

people who don’t have a twin would experience – the feeling of not knowing who you are without the academic to your creative, the extrovert to your introvert; essentially, the feeling of not knowing who you are without the other.

I’ve thought about this for years, and I’ve always wanted to write a book exploring it. What happens if the person you measure yourself against, for better or for worse, suddenly disappears? It’s not just having your other half vanish; it’s having the mirror through which you view yourself taken away. I knew I wanted to write a book about someone whose twin goes missing – but I also knew I didn’t want it to just be about that. The idea sat in my head for years, untouched and waiting.

Enter Poveglia...

I learned about Poveglia from an innocuous Facebook post almost ten years ago. An

island in the Venetian Lagoon, but away from the narrow canals and gothic

architecture of Venice itself. It’s clearly visible from the shore of the island of Lido – a

bank of trees, a canal intersecting the two halves, a bell tower reaching above the

canopy and into the sky. But while Lido is home to over 20,000 people, there is not a

soul on Poveglia.

It’s the perfect setting for a ghost story for three reasons. Firstly, being an island

means it’s isolated. That’s the most important part of any ghost story to me. Isolation

doesn’t have to come from a physical barrier – it could be a mental state. But a

character in a ghost story has to, in some form, feel cut off from other people,

because that raises the question: is all of this really happening, or is it a trick of the

mind?

Secondly, Poveglia has a bleak history. The idea of the past not being confined to the past is fundamental to any ghost story, but in order for that to feel threatening, the past has to be dark – and Poveglia has that in droves. A quarantine station during the Black Death? A mental asylum? Sign me up. And thirdly, Poveglia has thick forests, dilapidated buildings and little proper shelter, so any character there would have to contend with the elements. The idea of the land around you being out of control is, to me, one of the scariest parts of any story, ghosts or not.

It was from these two things – what I wanted to say about twins, and my desire to

write a ghost story set on Poveglia – that my debut novel was born.

The Island of the Lost tells the story of Liv, whose twin sister, Mia, vanished eighteen months ago. The police have decided Mia is dead, and everyone else seems to have given up on her.

But Liv is sure her sister is still alive, and one day, she remembers Poveglia. It had been a shared obsession between Mia and their mother, who died when the twins were twelve. Liv suddenly finds herself wondering if the reason the police did not find Mia is because they did not look on Poveglia.

So she travels to the island under the pretence of a journalistic assignment with her

colleague, Sam. Once there, she begins to hear, see and smell strange things. The

mainland disappears behind a cloud of fog. She is plagued by dreams. Sometimes

she hears the bell tower tolling in the night, even though the bell was removed years

ago. She ignores it all and continues searching for signs her sister was ever there,

but eventually she is forced to confront the one part of Mia she could never quite

accept – her conviction that ghosts exist.