One Boat
About the book
Author: Jonathan Buckley
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.
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My review
One Boat was my final read from the 2025 Booker Prize longlist, and I hate to say it, but I went out not with a bang but a whimper. That’s not to say I actively disliked the book — I listened to the audiobook (which worked well) all in one go and had a good enough time, but it just did not stick with me at all. I had to refresh my memory on its plot even two weeks later for our book club discussion.
One Boat is about a woman who travels to a small, nondescript town on the coast of Greece to journal and process her grief in the wake of her mother’s death, then returns to do the same thing again nine years later after her father dies. As she reconnects with the people who live there whom she met the first time, we get glimpses into both of her trips. There are lots of philosophical conversations between characters and reflections on how time has or hasn’t changed them. Which is how, at its core, this book is really investigating the true self, and if there is only one self, and whether you can be anyone other than who you are.
The first question is: did this book succeed in doing what it set out to do? I would say yes. Buckley’s choice to pepper our narrator’s internal dialogue with lots of passive voice as she looks at life as a series of picturesque snapshots and tableaus was effective, and I certainly felt like I grasped the themes he was going for. But the second question is: did I enjoy it? Like I said, I had a fine time while I was reading it, even if he did lose my attention in those long philosophical conversations (the book was too short for it to feel like those dragged on, IMO), and the ending pulled a move that I am generally not a big fan of. But a year from now, I doubt I will be able to tell you what happened in this book at all.
Content and trigger warnings
Death of a parent
Grief
Violence
Suicide (minor)
Alcoholism
