Winton explores our communion with nature, and those grainy stretches of our lives when we crave an island for ourselves. Lu lives only in the company of sharks and rays, foraging and fishing for his meals. When events conspire and he is chased out of town, he chooses to cast himself away on an island off the west Australian coast. In Dirt Music, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2002, he writes of Lu Fox, an outcast in the tough coastal town of his childhood.
It is believed that Defoe’s inspiration for the story came from real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on an uninhabited island off the Chilean coast.Īustralia’s Winton writes landscapes and loners with unrivalled rawness and clarity. He gradually creates a life for himself, building a house, fighting cannibals, and befriending Friday, a prisoner whose life he saves. The quintessential desert-island adventure, first published in 1719, sees the titular castaway spend 28 years on a remote, tropical island after being shipwrecked. It is one to be savoured for its gentle wisdom and gleaming wit. Ali Smith said this book “reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth”. Together they explore the island, discovering simple pleasures in nature, like the migration of birds or the arrival of a storm. Set on a small island in the Gulf of Finland, this timeless book tells the tale of an elderly artist spending a summer with her six-year-old granddaughter. An entire generation of travellers (me included) tucked this novel into their backpacks and went in search of the undiscovered. But utopia is laced with darkness, and the island paradise descends into violence and madness. Intrigued, Richard and two friends set off on a journey of discovery, eventually uncovering a community of travellers living on the shores of a Thai island.
When backpacker Richard is given a hand-sketched map, it promises to lead him to an unknown island and a secret beach untouched by tourism. Nick Hornby once described The Beach as “Lord of the Flies for Generation X”. We become witness to the base cruelties that branch from desperation and a hunger for power. At first, they try to create an organised, civilised and safe place to live, but their attempts quickly descend into unruly chaos. No list of castaway books would be complete without this 1954 novel, following a group of British schoolboys who become stranded on an uninhabited island. It’s a book about solitude, resilience and survival. Ultimately, it is the power of nature and the rhythm of the tides that offer both a healing and an awakening.
CASTAWAY PARADISE SHELLS LIST SERIES
A series of devastating events leads to the breakdown of her marriage, and Calidas finds herself alone and isolated, cast away from the places and people she knows. This memoir explores Calidas’s decision to swap city life for a remote Hebridean island. Each explores how the removal of the familiar can provide a challenge for survival, yet also a tantalising space for self-discovery. While the dictionary definition of a castaway is “a person who has been shipwrecked and stranded in an isolated place”, my list also includes books that examine why we may seek out our own isolation – be it on an island, a boat or a lighthouse.
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