Penguin Island is a satirical fictional history by Nobel Prize winner French author Anatole France. The longest-running plot thread, and probably the best known, satirizes the Dreyfus affair — though both brief and complex satires of European history, politics, philosophy and theology are present throughout the novel.

Penguin Island is about a fictitious island, inhabited by great auks, that existed off the northern coast of Europe. It’s written in the style of a sprawling 18th- and 19th-century history book, concerned with grand metanarratives, mythologizing heroes, hagiography and romantic nationalism.

Anatole France (16 April 1844-12 October 1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament”.