Lucy Irvine made her name with Castaway - a bestseller that was also made into a movie. Faraway is darker, gothic even. Invited by the Hepworth family to share the island "paradise" - Pigeon Island, in the Solomon Islands - to which they had emigrated from depressed Britain in 1947, Irvine cruelly dissects a dysfunctional family with dark secrets. "Paradise" is thoroughly debunked. She writes with perhaps unintentional irony: there are hints that the author's own private life is nearly as troubled as those of her unfortunate subjects. This may leave a feeling of distaste in some readers, and may also account for the book's relative lack of success. But I enjoyed the book party because I have met one of its subjects - then working as a storekeeper on Santa Cruz island, Solomon Islands - and also because, in the course of a decade sailing offshore, my wife Jenny and I have encountered many similar cases of individuals or whole families who sold up to find their own paradise, afloat or in the South Seas, only to find that they have brought with them the same problems from which they were trying to escape.
In 1999, Lucy Irvine took her three children to the farthest corner of the Solomons to live for a year on remote Pigeon Island. The invitation came from an intrepid 80-year-old, Diana Hepworth, who set sail from England in search of a faraway paradise. This work tells of both their experiences.
This is the startling, true-life story of Stewart Gore-Brown, who spent his life building a sprawling Victorian mansion in remote bush-land of what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia); The Africa House. Gore Brown emerges as a complex, fascinating character. For most of his adult life life he was obsessed with a long-distance (unconsummated ) affair that he carried out with an aristocratic English woman who was 20 years older - and also his aunt; he ends up marrying her daughter. Meanwhile, in some respects he behaves as the caricature of of a white colonial master, dressing formally for dinner every night in his rambling mansion - but is clearly loved by many of his staff and becomes friends with many of the leading figures in the country's struggle for independence.. I have served in Africa as a diplomat, and I found this portrayal of the dying days of the British Empire both poignant and revealing.
Christina Lamb's The Africa House is the bestselling account of an English gentleman and his African dream.
In the last decades of the British Empire, Stewart Gore-Brown build himself a feudal paradise in Northern Rhodesia; a sprawling country estate modelled on the finest homes of England, complete with uniformed servants, daily muster parades and rose gardens. He wanted to share it with the love of his life, the beautiful unconventional Ethel Locke King, one of the first women to drive and fly. She, however, was nearly twenty years his senior, married and his aunt. Lorna, the only other woman he…
Having spent a year sailing the remote channels of Tierra del Fuego, I devour any book that recalls the formative time that a young Charles Darwin spent in these waters, aboard HMS Beagle. There is little - if any - new research here, but Diana Preston writes fluently and engagingly. Darwin's evolving view of the world is well-captured - the title is apposite.
From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning historian, the colorful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin's journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man
When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles-invited by ship's captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship's naturalist-he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history. Nonetheless, over the course of the five-year journey…
Diplomat and long-distance cruiser Nicholas Coghlan had been curious about Japan ever since his father, a veteran of infantry fighting in Italy and Greece, confessed to him a dread of being sent to the Japanese front when the war in Europe ended in the Spring of 1945.
Sailing to the Heart of Japan is a voyage of personal discovery as the author's preconceptions are challenged. It's also a unique account of one of the world's least-known but most attractive cruising destinations.
Starting from New Zealand, Nicholas and his partner Jenny navigate Bosun Bird, their Vancouver 27, north through Pacific Island nations where memories of war linger. They make their landfall in Kyushu, in southwestern Japan. Over a period of fifteen months, they venture to the remote and depopulated archipelago of Goto Retto in the East China Sea, through Kanmon Kaikyo narrows and into the island-studded Inland Sea.
Everywhere - from Kagoshima to Tokyo Bay - Bosun Bird and her crew are met with astonishing kindness and thoughtful conversation. Travel by "yotto" allows them glimpses of an enigmatic land that are rarely offered to more conventional visitors.
The book comprises 242 pages, including 54 illustrations, 9 maps, and detailed descriptions of over 60 anchorages/mooring locations, complete with GPS coordinates. Sailing to the heart of Japan is as descriptive as it is informative about this little-known sailing destination.
