3 out of 5 stars

I don’t know what it is about islands, but there is something quite special about being on one. It is a fascination that Gavin Francis shares too, and he has been lucky enough to spend thirty years of his life travelling to some of the best islands on this planet, including the Andaman Islands, the Faroe Islands and even the Galapagos.

Most of these travels were because of his work as a doctor. But the book looks at lots of other writers experiences of islands as well as the use that islands have been put to over the years, for example for prisons, leper colonies and for pilgrimages.

This is a beautifully laid out book, full of wonderful maps of islands that Francis has been too, or he has lived on. It feels like a large print book as the text is a larger font and well-spaced. However, the maps are sometimes too small to read any detail from. The prose is well written, but it is a thin veneer of detail about his life travelling to these marvellous places. It is a shame really as it could have been so much better.

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