Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
An exploration of isolation and connectedness based on thirty years of travel, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Adventures in Human Being and Empire Antarctica
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR
In Island Dreams, Gavin Francis examines our collective fascination with islands. He blends stories of his own travels with psychology, philosophy and great voyages from literature, shedding new light on the importance of islands and isolation in our collective consciousness.
Comparing the life of freedom of thirty years of extraordinary travel from the Faroe Islands to the Aegean, from the Galapagos to the Andaman Islands with a life of responsibility as a doctor, community member and parent approaching middle age, Island Dreams riffs on the twinned poles of rest and motion, independence and attachment, never more relevant than in today’s perennially connected world.
Illustrated with maps throughout, this is a celebration of human adventures in the world and within our minds.
“Gavin Francis is a wonderful writer – thoughtful, engaging, immensely knowledgeable and supremely human”
Bill Bryson
See more reviews
“For those who have missed travelling this year, and for anyone who has pondered the meaning of “isolation”, there is an ideal present – a beautiful and highly illustrated book called Island Dreams, by Gavin Francis, exploring the place of islands in our psyche – from Lamu to the Lofoten Islands, the Faroes to the Falklands, Avalon to the Azores”
Hilary Mantel
“Highly absorbing … 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”
guardian
“An intoxicating voyage during which maps become fictions and fictions verifiable facts. Myths of returning and older legends carry us out in a shared fugue of obsession and release. Here is a worthy companion to the dream labyrinths of Borges”
Iain Sinclair
“A thrilling book – beautiful and spare at once … A real achievement”
Tim Dee
Gavin Francis
Gavin Francis is an award-winning writer and GP. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, including Adventures in Human Being, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and Empire Antarctica, which won Scottish Book of the Year in the SMIT Awards and was shortlisted for both the Ondaatje and Costa Prizes. He has written for the Guardian, The Times, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. His work is published in eighteen languages. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
@gavinfranc | gavinfrancis.com
The irresistible lure of island life
Gavin Francis, the author of the beautiful Island Dreams, writes in the Guardian about the fascination that islands exert.
“The love of islands is a widespread affliction – why else are we still reading Robinson Crusoe after 300 years? Why Treasure Island? Why after 75 years and over 2,000 episodes are we still listening to Desert Island Discs? From the blessed isles of Tír na nÓg and Thomas More’s Utopia to the island-dramas of CS Lewis and Enid Blyton, it seems we can’t get enough of them.”
Gavin Francis
Guardian