Cast Away

or, the Surprising Adventures of Alexander Selkirk
From the author of Saltblood (winner of the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize) comes the true-life story of Alexander Selkirk, a sweeping tale of isolation and tenacity, asking: Who is a man, when everything is stripped away?

'A revelatory meditation on humanity' GUARDIAN
'De Tores builds Selkirk’s world with detail and patience – it’s an impressive imaginative feat' THE TIMES
'Beautiful, fascinating, heartbreaking, philosophically engaging – and often very funny' JO HARKIN

How big must a man’s folly be, that it can cost him the whole of his life? As big as a ship; as big as an island.

1704: Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk has been abandoned by his own shipmates on a remote, uninhabited island. With little hope of rescue, and wild goats and cats as his only companions, he is forced to confront not only the urgent challenges of survival, but also the troubled, unsavoury past that has brought him here. What kind of man is deliberately stranded by his crew, to face near-certain death?

On the island, he must use his grit, tenacity and ingenuity to survive. As his isolation deepens, Selkirk’s experience takes an extraordinary and often blackly comic turn, for the island’s consolations prove as unexpected as its trials. The longer he is stranded, the more Selkirk wonders if he will ever escape the island, and in what ways he will be changed if he does.

A tale of adventure and endurance, isolation and friendship, despair and hope, this gripping, singular novel asks who we are – and who we become – when everything else is stripped away.

In Cast Away, award-winning author Francesca de Tores boldly reimagines the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for the classic novel Robinson Crusoe. The world knows Crusoe’s story – yet what unfolds on Selkirk’s island is stranger by far .

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