In 1983 an account of a year on a desert island, 'Castaway', was published which became an immediate bestseller. It told the story of how 26-year-old Lucy Irvine answered an ad in 'Time Out' ("Writer seeks "wife" for desert island") and went out to Tuin Island off the coast of north-east Australia with the much older Gerald Kingsland.
Sixteen years later, in 1999, Lucy took her three children to a remote island on the farthest corner of the Solomons, Pigeon Island, to live for one year. She had been invited to go there by the intrepid 80-year-old Diana Hepworth who, in 1947, set sail from England with her husband Tom to look for a better life and found Pigeon where they lived together until Tom's death in 1993, and where Diana still lives.
Lucy wanted to give her sons the island experience; Diana wanted Lucy to write her and Tom's story. These two wants have resulted in an extraordinary narrative with its exploration of the need in people for faraway places and its search for an unattainable paradise.
