Island

Island is a novel by the English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1962 and set on a fictional island in the Indian Ocean.

Will Farnaby arrives on Pala as the survivor of a wreck, and he arrives with an agenda, because he works for a man with interests in the island's oil. What he finds is a society that has been organised deliberately, with schools that teach children to pay attention, a pharmacology built on a local plant, a psychology that treats ideas as things to be examined, and a religion that borrows from Buddhism without pretending to be it. Farnaby is a sceptic, and much of the novel is his education. Huxley gives the island a history as well as a present, including the point at which it closed itself to outside control, and he shows the pressures that will not leave it alone. The book is Huxley's answer to his own earlier dystopia: an attempt to describe a community that is happy without being stupid.

It was his last novel, and it carries his argument about what a society would have to do differently if it wanted its members to be free.