I Am an Island by Tamsin Calidas

Tamsin Calidas’s story is one that initially reads like a Jenny Colgan novel: young woman working in the media in London seeks different life and moves to a remote Scottish island to find it. Hilarity – and usually romance – ensues. Yet, for Calidas, hilarity most definitely did not follow.

She suffers fertility problems and her marriage to husband Rab breaks down. She has accidents which leave her with two broken hands, she suffers a serious respiratory illness and loses her father. Her mother develops dementia, and Cristall – her only true friend on the island – is killed in a car accident.

Perhaps above all, her reception on the island – which particular island it is is kept deliberately anonymous – is nothing short of hostile. There are digs about Calidas’s childless status and the colour of her skin – her father is Asian South African.

Calidas’s writing is beautiful and lyrical, making her memoir strangely compelling. Yet it is difficult to see the author as the completely innocent party in this battle of cultures between the apparently oldfashioned islanders and the “incomer” from Notting Hill. Her own prejudices often slip out. When she first speaks to Cristall, she admits freely that she is thrilled to hear an “educated English accent”.

“There was a time when I longed to leave this island, but a meshing of circumstances held me down and that feeling passed,” she says in the final chapter. It is hard to tell if, after the publication of this memoir, she will be once again faced with a resurgence of the hostility she felt in the early years, or if her fellow islanders will little care about the scratchings of an incomer.

Whatever they feel, I found I Am an Island an uncomfortable yet beautiful read.