| On the Isle of Antioch | |
| Author: | Amin Maalouf |
| Title Orig: | Nos frères inattendus |
| Orig Lang Code: | fr |
| Translator: | Natasha Lehrer |
| Country: | France |
| Language: | French |
| Publisher: | Éditions Grasset |
| Pub Date: | 20 September 2020 |
| English Pub Date: | 5 December 2023 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Isbn: | 978-2-246-82641-5 |
On the Isle of Antioch (fr|Nos frères inattendus) is a 2020 novel by the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf.
The novel is told from the perspective of Alec Zander, a cartoonist who has settled on the small island of Antioch off the Atlantic coast of France, where he lives in semi-isolation. When communications temporarily go down and rumours emerge about nuclear war, he comes in contact with a secret society, les amis d'Empédocle, that functions as a parallel civilisation and has set out to prevent planetary destruction.
Christophe Henning of La Croix called the book "epic and chilling" and wrote that it contains both criticism and humour.[1] Khadija Khalifé of The French Review wrote that On the Isle of Antioch repeats the message from Maalouf's 2019 book , where human wisdom is the solution to threatening apocalypse. She wrote that a strength of the book is its combination of optimism and refusal to deny real problems.[2] Kirkus Reviews called it "an elegant portrait of a dying world" and compared Maalouf to Arturo Pérez-Reverte in the way he handles speculative fiction.[3]