The Castaway Book

Lucy Irvine replied to an advertisement which simply said: " Writer seeks "wife" for a year on a tropical island." Most of us would have probably thought about how wonderful it would be to get away for a year, to peace and quiet away from the hassles of everyday life. We would have sighed a little and then forgotten all about it. But not Irvine. She wrote to Gerald Kingsland, the author in the ad, and before she had time to think about it she was leaving her life as a clerk with the Inland Revenue far behind as she headed off with her new "husband" to a tropical island somewhere between Northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. Lucy Irvine is indeed a remarkable specimen, if at times not necessarily likeable, and her account of her year on Tuin which, in her introduction to this new edition of Castaway, she describes as "a combination of tropical hell and heaven" is indeed intriguing to the last. As the sense of the real woman, naked and exposed without the conventional trappings of normality, begins to shine through, Castaway takes the reader to the very heart of an undoubtedly troubled woman on a search for her true self. The subject of much debate and publicity when Castaway was first published in 1983, and immortalised in a film starring Amanda Donahoe and Oliver Reed, Irvine is now living once again on a remote island with her three children. With this in mind, anyone who read this extraordinary account when it first hit the bookstands will be able to now look back with a greater understanding of why she went in the first place. And anyone who has yet to encounter this story of a wilful yet undoubtedly damaged young woman attempting to run away from her life, but coming face to face with herself and not always liking what she sees will find Castaway as fascinating a book as they are ever likely to read, and one which has an eternal appeal for the castaway in all of us. --Susan HarrisonRead More