Island Dreams (eBook)

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

Empire Antarctica is the embodiment of everything I admire in travel writing
- a great journey, intense isolation, wide reading, vivid writing, scientific research,
and something in the nature of an old-fashioned ordeal. I loved this book

Immensely engaging and often unexpected. His achievement here is to guide readers
through his special landscape with such eloquence and subtlety

Wonderful, subtle, unpretentious . . . Produces a kind of complicity between the author, the reader, and the subject

A sober and beautiful book about the landscape of the human body: thought-provoking and eloquent

A valuable addition to polar literature, vividly describing the brutal,
but beautiful, realities of undergoing an Antarctic winter

Fluent, subtle, tough and often beautiful

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

A thrilling book - beautiful and spare at once . . . A real achievement

In this charming and beautifully-illustrated book, Gavin Francis asks important questions about isolation and connection, and considers the ways in which islands have been imagined and experienced by travellers through the ages