BOOK VI: THE LAST ISLANDS CHARACTERS
The Last Islands is set on St-Pierre and Miquelon islands, near Newfoundland. Those islands and characters are not Canadian, they are considered French (France) nationals.
Sandrine Gaudet:
Nurse practitioner on Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, 11 years in post, 45 years old. The 14th and final resident admitted to The Arsenault Farm, the expedition medic/observer on the Langlade scouting mission.
Begins, privately and methodically, logging an anomalous blue-white light in the fog around the farm, and independently confirms the same conflict-triggered pattern later on Langlade, where the phenomenon is seen directly and takes two members of the expedition.
Rémi Voisin:
History and geography teacher at the Saint-Pierre lycée, originally from Brittany, 11 years on the islands, widower. Crosses to Miquelon with his daughter Camille and is admitted to The Arsenault Farm, where he finds unexpected purpose in physical labour (fence repair) and in teaching Théo his letters. Becomes Sandrine’s closest confidant at the farm before she leaves for the Langlade expedition.
CAMILLE VOISIN:
Rémi’s daughter, 16, mother deceased four years prior. Quietly becomes Marguerite’s apprentice and successor-in-training, taking over the farm’s inventory management
Marguerite Arsenault:
Sheep, cattle, and duck farmer on Miquelon, ~50, third-generation islander, the farm in her family 40 years.
Begins quietly fortifying her farm as soon as the crisis starts, and admits residents strictly by capacity, “the land has a number. You go over the number and everybody starves instead of some people surviving”.
Thomas Arcand:
Gendarme sergeant on Saint-Pierre, originally from Moncton (wife and daughter there, contact lost early in the crisis).
Sent by Marcel to reconnoitre Miquelon, discovers Marguerite Arsenault’s farm and its newly-installed gate, a detail he notes as significant but leaves out of the official record.
Meets Père Labbé in the village before returning to report.
MARCEL PELLETIER:
Préfet (French state administrator) of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, posted three years prior from Bordeaux/Lyon.
Logs the silence from Paris with obsessive procedural precision as the ferry and planes stop and the food/fuel numbers stop adding up; issues an emergency rationing decree that the elected Territorial Council declares illegitimate on the grounds that his authority, delegated from a France that no longer answers.
NADIA:
Environment-office worker, nine years on the islands (originally from Lyon), a Langlade specialist.
Leader/organizer of the eight-person expedition scouting Langlade as a second refuge site. Watches the fog for two weeks before the crossing, “working with tendencies” the way her training taught her.
Holds the group together through two vanishings and a storm, carrying guilt she voices openly (“We shouldn’t have come here… It’s not your fault,” said to herself as much as anyone).
Père Labbé:
Catholic priest on Miquelon, in post since 1987. Recurring moral and liturgical anchor. Ministers to the survivors of the Langlade expedition in the closing chapters and gives the novel’s most direct, still deliberately non-committal, acknowledgment that something real and unnamed exists in the fog: “things my grandfather’s generation named… I don’t think the absence of words means the absence of things”.
Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.