The Best Books of the Year round-ups are hitting the newstands, and — happily — many of these include The Colony. Last week it was the Chicago Tribune and the Rocky Mountain News. As the latter is one of my hometown papers (the Denver Post being the other), it was especially nice to read their tout:

Rivaling fiction in its twists and turns, Tayman tells the story of Hawaii’s Molokai leper colony, where those with leprosy (or suspected of the disease) had been rounded up at gunpoint and dumped to face a horrific existence. Tayman details unspeakable cruelty but also incomprehensible altruism.

Also nice was learning that a consortium of the country’s leading independent bookstores chose the paperback edition of The Colony as a January 2007 Book Sense Pick. (The hardcover edition, by the way, was the #1 Book Sense pick for January 2006.) It’s another unexpected honor, and guarantees that the paperback will get plenty of shelf space and prominence in stores. Here’s the blurb that accompanies the announcement:

“The Colony is an adept and absorbing history of the most notorious island in the Hawaiian chain, Molokai, where lepers were forcibly exiled. The humanity and suffering of Molokai’s lepers comes across as clearly as a scream across the ages.” — Jessica Friedlander, Bay Books, Monterey, CA