THE AGE OF ISLANDS

IN SEARCH OF NEW AND DISAPPEARING ISLANDS

ALASTAIR BONNETT

Atlantic, 229pp, £16.99, ebook £9.99

Who doesn’t love the idea of an island? Preferably a private one, blessed with constant good weather, discreet mod cons and abundant fresh water. Alastair Bonnett’s new book looks at islands new, old and man-made; some of them newly emerging, others rapidly submerging because of climate change. James Hamilton-paterson in the Literary Review enjoyed a ‘knowledgeable world tour of different types of islands, much enhanced by selfdeprecating accounts of his own often shoestring visits’. Bonnett (a professor of physical geography) is, he thought, ‘particularly good on geophysical explanations for why and how they can surface suddenly, like Surtsey off the coast of Iceland, or bob up and down, like Graham Island between Sicily and Tunisia, which has appeared and disappeared several times since the mid-19th century’.

Mark Mason in the Daily Mail found the accounts of man-made islands the most interesting. ‘They’re nothing new: the Lau fishing people built about 80 of them in the Solomon Islands by paddling out, every year, for centuries, and dropping lumps of coral into the water. Their islands were refuges from attack by farmers on the mainland.’ In the Sunday Times, James Macconnachie was struck by Bonnett’s ‘unsettling’ tour of the ‘megalomaniac’ artificial island resorts now sprouting from the waters round Dubai and pondered that the reason we love islands is that they allow us a fantasy of total control.