'Island Genres, Genre Islands' moves the debate about literature and place onto new ground by exploring the island settings of bestsellers. Through a focus on four key genres—crime fiction, thrillers, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction—Crane and Fletcher show that genre is fundamental to both the textual representation of real and imagined islands and to actual knowledges and experiences of islands. The book offers broad, comparative readings of the significance of islandness in each of the four genres as well as detailed case studies of major authors and texts. These include chapters on Agatha’s Christie’s islands, the role of the island in ‘Bondspace,’ the romantic islophilia of Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island series, and the archipelagic geography of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Crane and Fletcher’s book will appeal to specialists in literary studies and cultural geography, as well as in island studies.

"Structurally, Island Genres, Genre Islands considers four key popular genres—crime fiction, thrillers, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction—from the perspective of island (literary) studies. Organised in these four parts, the highly readable text, made up of 12 short chapters of around 10 pages each, plus an epilogue, will be a seminal contribution to the field of island studies" - Island Studies Journal

"As this book shows, islands are commonly used as locations for popular fiction but there’s an ever-present risk of homogeneity in the representations of islands. Islands can provide passing exoticism for the purposes of plot but they must eventually be left behind." - Literary Geographies

"To paraphrase Mond from [Aldous Huxley’s] Brave New World, it’s lucky that there are such a lot of genres and island fiction publications in the world – as well as researchers such as Crane and Fletcher to analyse them." - Social & Cultural Geography

"Like a cruise liner, Crane and Fletcher’s Island Genres, Genre Islands takes its readers on a journey around various genre islands, making brief stops at selected ports. While the cruise experience would be enriched by disembarking from the ship and spending more time onshore at crime atoll, thriller island, the isle of popular romance, and the archipelago of fantasy, or by having visited them previously, the on-board lecture programme ensures that all travellers will return home feeling more knowledgeable about the differences between them and convinced that “[p]opular fiction offers […] a potent site for identifying and unpacking habits of thinking about distinctive natural environments” (xi)." - Journal of Popular Romance Studies