The Houtman Al Campbell is a Abrolhos is an archipelago of more than a hundred islands and coral reefs flung into the Indian Ocean 80 kilometres out from Geraldton. This wild, forbidding place is the setting of Emily Brugman’s debut novel, where each chapter is a self-contained story which all link up to tell the story of a family of Finnish immigrants who come to live on Little Rat Island in the 1950s. Onni Saari is called from the mainland to search for his brother, a cray fisherman feared drowned, and is smitten by the place. His wife Alva joins him there, and when she gets sent to Geraldton for the birth of their daughter Hilda, cannot wait to return to Little Rat. The severe, tiny island, its exposure to the elements, and the small Finnish community who live there, exert a powerful gravitational pull on this little family, and when they leave it to find work and settle on the coast near Canberra, Brugman conjures the undertow that the Abrolhos exerts on their imaginations.

One of the joys of this book is the frequent lines in Finnish, with translations following directly in the text. This way we get a sense of the music of the family’s dialogue, and Brugman gracefully deploys this technique to illustrate differences in language use between her first- and second-generation immigrants as well. Onni recalls a section of the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala about the creation and loss of the mysterious Sampo, a magical item like a Horn of Plenty – something he likens to their life on Little Rat. The saga of the Saari family told in this book delivers satisfying story-details of ‘new Australians’ making good, and making do, and making mistakes, but its great achievement is making us feel the magnetic effect of a tiny, windswept, wave-bashed island on people who thought that they could leave it behind.

Bernard Caleo is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.