Reading Circle 54: ‚Castaway‘ by Lucy Irvine

Castaway (1983), Lucy Irvine

In 1981 Lucy Irvine answered an advertisement from a man seeking a wife: he wanted a companion to spend a year with him on a desert island. ‘G’ (Gerald Kingsland) intended to write a book about the experience. Lucy was just 25, G twice her age, with three sons. Lucy had applied because she wanted ‘a major personal challenge’. Lucy fell in love with the seductive, if cruel, beauty of the remote island in the Torres Strait, off NE Queensland.

Uncompromisingly candid and sometimes shocking, ‘Castaway’ is Lucy’s compulsively readable account of a desert island dream which threatened to turn into a nightmare of illness, thirst and emotional estrangement.

Sandra and Andrew discuss the book, offering several longer readings.

Music played:

‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’, by Eric Coates (theme music for BBC Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’)