Exploring the eternal allure of islands

Posted on June 13, 2017

The Island in Imagination and Experience, published on June 15, is a genuinely unique book that explores islands in their entirety, including their politics, history and geography. It is also a love letter to Earth’s half a million islands and an investigation into why they exert such an insistent grip on our imaginations.

In a book chock-full of anecdotes and stories, facts and maps, self-confessed islomane Barry Smith delves into the literature, philosophy and art that islands have inspired – to show why they fascinate us so.

The renowned travel writer Jim Perrin has described The Island in Imagination and Experience as “[a] fascinating, scrupulous, angry, scholarly book.”

Barry Smith examines the kind of human experiences that islands inspire, and he disentangles the myths and the facts to reveal just why islands exert such an insistent grip on the human psyche.

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Barry Smith will be launching The Island in Imagination and Experience at Blackwell’s South Bridge, Edinburgh, at 6.30pm on Thursday 15 June.