Island Calling
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  • Published: 19 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529918823
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Island Calling

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
1 Jul 2025
EBook
19 Jun 2025
Audiobook
19 Jun 2025
Hardback
26 Jul 2025
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The delicious second instalment of the Glorious Tuga trilogy is a very funny and moving story of mothers and daughters (and a tortoise called Gloria Gaynor) set on everyone’s favourite tropical island

*** Preorder the brilliant second novel in the 'Glorious Tuga' series, from Costa Prize-winning author, Francesca Segal ***

On remote Tuga de Oro, vet Charlotte Walker’s caseload of donkeys, cows, and ailing lizards has only increased. She still can’t believe the humiliating truth about her father. Probably, she ought to feel worse than she does. But the islanders have taken Charlotte to their hearts and somehow, between days on the farms and nights with a new love interest, she’s content to remain in blissful retreat from her real life in London. Just for now.

But real life hits the island with the force of a tropical storm: Charlotte’s mother arrives. Lucinda Compton-Neville knows an identity crisis when she sees one, and has come to haul her daughter back on course: back to England, back to her career, back home where she belongs.

Funny, moving, and hope-filled, Island Calling is a joyous novel about mothers and daughters; about holding on and letting go.

PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO GLORIOUS TUGA:

’A much-needed escape, I warmly recommend this beauty’ NIGELLA LAWSON
‘A magical novel, so uplifting, heartwarming, funny’ MARIAN KEYES
‘Brilliantly and thoroughly imagined. I didn't want to go home’ NICK HORNBY
‘Sparkling and sophisticated’ JESSIE BURTON
  • Published: 19 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529918823
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

About the author

Francesca Segal

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her first novel, The Innocents, won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. Her most recent novel, The Awkward Age (‘smart, soulful and compelling’, Nick Hornby) was published in 2017.

portrait photo of Francesca Segal

Also by Francesca Segal

Welcome to Glorious Tuga
Mother Ship
The Innocents
The Awkward Age
See all

Praise for Island Calling

'A rich and memorable cast in a brilliantly imagined landscape. ISLAND CALLING is every bit as charming and absorbing as Welcome to Glorious Tuga, with the added bonus of a new, entirely believably parental relationship. A joy'

Nick Hornby

Light and shade mingle in a narrative that is witty, soulful and escapist in all the right ways

Mail on Sunday

[Segal] has written something almost defiantly classical: shapely, generous, intricately resolved… The brilliance of Island Calling is that it knows escape is a fiction and offers that fiction, precisely, as solace

Observer

‘What I enjoy most about Island Calling is how immersive it is. I felt like I was hiking through this lush island with Charlotte ... For all the joy of this tiny island, it is a community thrumming with secrets. … If there is an ultimate holiday read, this is it’

Pandora Sykes

'I can't think of anything I'd rather read if I were in proximity to sand and sea (though it would be so cheering in the depths of winter too). Francesca Segal has, incredibly, invented a whole island ... The result is deeply satisfying, engrossing, and utterly charming. ... Do yourself a favour and read these [WELCOME TO GLORIOUS TUGA and ISLAND CALLING], whether you're going away or not: they are summer between covers'

India Knight

'An utter joy'

Red

This second book is just as irresistible as the first, offering a sharp dissection of mother-daughter bonds… Wise, funny and very romantic

i

'Absolutely blissful ... Get both [books in the series]: I’ll eat my hat if you don’t love them'

India Knight, Sunday Times