Eurydice The Confession of Tom Ayrton

In 1853, a man named Thomas Ayrton was set ashore on an uninhabited island in the southern Pacific and left there. The official account, filed by New York Herald correspondent Gideon Spilett and entered into the record of Lord Glenarvan's expedition, described it as appropriate justice. The case was closed. Twelve years later, Ayrton came down a hillside and found himself among the colonists of Lincoln Island - men and women who knew nothing of how he had arrived, or what he had done before, or what he had become in the years between. He had killed his wife. He had spent twelve years alone. He had arrived, in some sense he could not yet articulate, at the far end of something. Eurydice is the novel Ayrton gives to Spilett across a series of late-night sessions at Granite House - the true account, the inside one, the version that the brief description and the case was closed could not contain. It is the story of the ships, the colony, the storm, the bottle, and the man who walked back from the edge of the island every night for twelve years and chose, each time, to walk back. What Ayrton does not know, until the sessions are nearly complete, is that Spilett was on the Duncan. That he recognized Ayrton on the slope. That he already had the official record - had written it himself - and spent months constructing the alternative one that only Ayrton could provide. Eurydice is a novel about the two versions of any life: the one that enters the record, and the one that has to be extracted, session by session, from the person who lived it. It is about guilt that does not resolve and isolation that changes you in ways you cannot name until you are standing among people again. It is about a man who asked a journalist to write it right - not knowing that the journalist already knew what wrong looked like, because he had written that too.