Ten of the Best Island Stories


Tricia Adams chooses the ten best island-set adventures. 10


Islands are an entirety in themselves, they can be a different world allowing either escape or underlining isolation and difference. They may be attractive or, in fact, the exact opposite and be something you need to escape from, giving characters and plots a whole different series of problems and challenges than might be the case on a mainland. In many cases the island is a cypher to place the characters under a different stress.


Personally, I have ambivalent feelings about islands – their isolation appeals to the loner part of my character – though I know I could never live entirely on an island as the gregarious part of my nature needs other places and a large circle of friends and acquaintances to react with. But, as I regularly say, reading is a safe place to expose yourself to other experiences and the following books are some of the best reads about islands.


Where the World Ends


Geraldine McCaughrean Usborne Publishing 9781474943437 £6.99


The 2018 CILIP Carnegie Medal winner is a powerful story of the young men and boys who every year spend three weeks on the remote sea stac off St Kilda. This is set in the summer of 1727 and the predicament of the group when no one returns to collect them from the stac is explored. This is historical fiction of the highest quality – a Wolf Hall for young people, if you will. The boys, knowing nothing like this has happened before, assume the world


has ended and they are they only survivors – but what can they do to get away? The story explores the depths of their isolation, their strength of character and their resilience in an unforgettable engrossing read.


The Island


Nicky Singer, illustrated by Chris Riddell Caboodle Books, 978 0 9929389 6 3 £6.99


Cameron, who has spent his life in urban settings,


arrives on an


uninhabited Arctic island whilst his mother is carrying out scientific research there.


Except when graves start to He thinks he is quite


prepared for everything the climate can throw at him and believes his mother’s rational explanations for much that he sees.


open and he sees an Inuit girl and a large white bear that no one else is seeing. The book is run through with Inuit legends as the story explores


Cameron’s arrogance in thinking the rest of the world can plunder the seas and the unexplored lands for their own ends. An exploration of loneliness, legend and man’s conscience.


10 Books for Keeps No.231 July 2018


Edge Chronicles 1: Curse of the Gloamglozer: First Book of Quint


Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Random House Children’s Books 9780552569620 £7.99


Fourteen-year-old Quint Verginix is the only remaining son of a famous sky- pirate. He and his father have journeyed to the city of Sanctaphrax – a great floating rock, bound to the ground below by a chain, an island floating in the sky. Deep inside the great rock of the island something horrible lurks. With his father away, Quint may be


the only one who can save Sanctaphrax from the dreaded curse of the gloamglozer. This is the first in an interconnected series of fantasy novels that take readers on a long and rewarding adventure through floating islands and amazing lands, where daring and friendship help overcome apparently insurmountable enemies. A fun read with the darker moments underlining the mystery and adventure elements.


Kensuke’s Kingdom


Michael Morpurgo Egmont 9781405221740 £6.99


Michael is washed up on a Pacific island in a storm – by himself. He finds it impossible to survive in such an alien landscape and so curls up to sleep – probably not to wake up. But he does wake up and finds a plate of food beside him... It is some time before he understands that his helper is an old Japanese man who does not want others on his island. Over time a friendship and trust build between the two characters as they face future adversity together. Told in Morpugo’s easy to read style this is a great book


for younger readers, teaching much with a light touch.


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