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The reality of solitude and the beauty of islands animate these two different but highly absorbing memoirs
In a year of lockdown and isolation, books about islands seem a good place to turn for comfort and to reflect on our predicament. There are many to choose from. From Utopia and Robinson Crusoe to Aldous Huxley’s Island and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, imaginary islands have long featured in the philosophical and literary imagination. Nonfiction in which real islands play a central role is almost a genre in itself. The work of the late Tim Robinson in relation to the Aran islands has helped shape a generation of nature writers, while in Sea Room Adam Nicolson has gifted the Shiants to those who are unlikely ever to get there. Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands was an international bestseller and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun is unforgettable.
In Island Dreams, Gavin Francis combines memoir from a lifetime of travel and the practice of medicine, observations on the geography and history of islands across the globe, and reflections on how islands illuminate his own life and the human condition. Tamsin Calidas’s I Am an Island is the story of how she came, through more than 15 years of struggle, to make a kind of home on one small Scottish island. Hers is a vivid and at times almost unbearably distressing story from which it is very hard to turn away. Continue reading...