Diana’s mother with dementia, who was always distant with Diana growing up, gets COVID and passes away. Over that time, Diana has limited cell reception and WIFI access, but she gets regular e-mails from Finn detailing the progression of the virus in the States. Eventually, the two week lockdown turns into two months. Beatriz and Gabriel show Diana around the island. When she finds out the hotel she booked is also closed, Diana is relieved when an old lady (“ Abuela“) lets her stay in the tiny apartment attached to Abuela’s house.ĭiana soon meets Abuela’s son Gabriel and an unhappy 14-year-old girl named Beatriz, who is Gabriel’s daughter with his ex-wife. Everyone else is leaving, but she impulsively decides to stick around. Diana travels alone, but arrives at Isabela Island to learn that it’s under a two-week lockdown due to the virus. Securing the painting for Sotheby’s was a huge coup for Diana, but today Diana gets the unfortunate news that Kitomi wants to hold off on the auction to limit the spread of coronavirus.ĭiana and Finn are supposed to travel to the Galápagos the next day, but Finn ends up staying behind since the hospital needs him. Diana meets with the infamous Kitomi Ito (a fictional stand-in for Yoko Ono) regarding the upcoming auction of a very famous painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Diana O’Toole is an ambitious and driven 29-year-old working for Sotheby’s, and her boyfriend Finn is a doctor at New York-Presbyterian.
In Part One, the book opens on March 13, 2020, and coronavirus cases have just started being detected in the U.S. The book ends as she turns around to see who the person is. She encounters someone in the same manner that she met Gabriel in her dream. In the Epilogue, Diana travels to Isabela Island in May 2023. She decides to change her career and break up with her boyfriend. Eventually, Diana realizes that even if it wasn’t real, the experience changed her. As Diana tries to make sense of her memories (were they a dream? was it an out of body experience? was it a vision of the future?), she also learns her mother never died and works to resolve her issues with their relationship. She never went to the Galápagos and instead she hallucinated the trip. and has been being treated for COVID for the last 10 days. One day, Diana gets caught in a riptide, and when she awakes she learns she’s in the U.S. In the U.S., Diana’s mother (who she had a complicated relationship with) passes away from COVID. She also helps Beatriz, who is struggling with coming out as gay. Over the next two months, she reflects on her life and becomes romantically involved with Gabriel. She becomes stranded there when the island goes on lockdown, and she meets Gabriel Fernandez and his daughter Beatriz. The two-paragraph version: In March 2020 towards the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S., Diana O’Toole travels to Isabela Island in the Galápagos on vacation by herself after her boyfriend, a doctor, has to stay behind to tend to COVID patients.
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