Jules Verne marooned Tom Ayrton on Tabor Island for twelve years, rescued him, reformed him, and killed him defending the colony, all in about thirty pages, and never once went inside him. Eurydice is the account Verne did not write.

In the months after the rescue, the correspondent Gideon Spilett runs a series of sessions with Ayrton, somewhere between testimony and interview. Ayrton has decided in advance what the sessions get and what they do not, and the reader watches him choose, watches the gaps open where he stops. Verne left the crimes deliberately vague, and a man without specific crimes is a category rather than a man, so this book names them clearly enough that you know exactly who arrived on that rock. It also gives him a wife Verne never mentioned. Her name was Eurydice. She died of a progressive neurological disease across four years, and what Ayrton did for her at the end of those four years is the center of the book. He says it once, partly, and the reader understands what he is not saying.

This is isolation written physically and precisely: a world three hours around, seen whole from one beach, and a man who came ashore planning to use the single cartridge left beside his rifle and kept finding reasons to wait. It is the interior of a character the original used as furniture, testimony structure where the silences carry the story, a confession from a man who does not ask to be forgiven. Built from Verne's original and complete on its own. 388 pages.

Content warning: mutiny, violent crime, and the death of a spouse from progressive neurological illness.