In Island Dreams, Gavin Francis journeys into our collective fascination with islands. He blends stories of his own travels with great voyages from literature and philosophical exploration, and he examines the place of islands and isolation in our collective consciousness. Comparing the life of freedom of thirty years of extraordinary travel - from the Faroe Islands to the Aegean, from the Galapagos to the Andaman Islands - with a life of responsibility as a doctor, community member and parent approaching middle age, Island Dreams riffs on the twinned poles of rest and motion, independence and attachment, never more relevant than in today's perennially connected world. Beautifully illustrated with maps throughout, this is a celebration of human adventures in the world and within our minds.
Author
Gavin Francis was born in Scotland in 1975, and has travelled widely on all seven continents. He has crossed Eurasia by motorcycle, and spent a year in Antarctica. He works as a medical doctor as well as a writer. When travelling he is most interested in the way that places shapes the lives and stories of the people who live in them. His first book, True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, explores the history of Europe's expansion northwards from the first Greek explorers to the Polar expeditions of the late 19th and 20th centuries. It was nominated for a William Mills Prize for Polar Books. Of it Robert Macfarlane wrote: 'a seriously accomplished first book, by a versatile and interesting writer... it is set apart by the elegance and grace of its prose, and by its abiding interest in landscapes of the mind. Francis explores not only the terrain of the far North, but also the ways in which the North has been imagined... a dense and unusual book.' In 2011 he received a Creative Scotland Writer's Award towards the completion of a book about the year he spent living beside a colony of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. Empire Antarctica will be published by Chatto & Windus in November 2012.
