Where is home? Who is family? What is community? These are some of the questions that Francesca Segal asks and answers in her heart-warming novel Welcome To Glorious Tuga.
Segal won the Costa First Novel Award for her 2012 debut, The Innocents, and has since published another novel and a memoir. Her third novel opens with Charlotte, an academic vet with a special interest in tortoises, fleeing London and her mother, a ball-breaking QC who has raised Charlotte single-handedly.
Charlotte never knew her father growing up, and was allowed to believe he had abandoned her and her mother. But when her mother lets slip that she never actually told Charlotte’s father about her, Charlotte is hurt and takes off on a year’s fellowship to the far-flung tropical island of Tuga de Oro, where she hopes to study their endangered tortoises, as well as maybe get some answers about her father.
On the lengthy voyage to Tuga Charlotte strikes up a friendship with Dan, an islander sent abroad for his education who is now returning to take up the role of the island’s chief medical officer so that his uncle can retire.
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Once she arrives on the island, complete with a crush on Dan, Charlotte meets a vast array of charming characters (the book begins with a lengthy dramatis personae), not least Martha, the tortoise, and Charlotte’s very handsome and uncouth landlord Levi. Cue delicious enemies-to-lovers tension.
Over the course of the following year Charlotte learns what it is to be part of a tight-knit community, and what it is to finally be herself.
Through her many intricate and entertaining characters Segal skilfully explores her core ideas of identity, belonging and how the bonds of community and friendship can be as strong as those of family. It is this aspect of the novel that wins the reader over completely, particularly within the context of a world full of isolation, alienation, and loneliness.
Is it a little bit homespun and schmaltzy at times? Sure. But it is also overwhelmingly gentle, kind, funny, uplifting and romantic, which makes it a perfect escapist summer read. One for the suitcase. Or, on second thoughts, one to hoard like a squirrel’s nut for the cold, dark days of winter.
