Listen to the audiobook, read by Lucy Irvine herself
When 25-year-old Lucy Irvine answered this ad in Time Out magazine in January 1981, her life changed forever. Within a year, the young Scotswoman had gone from working in a tax office in London to living on a remote, uninhabited island with a stranger twice her age.
Lucy Irvine was bored, restless and eager to do something different. But her 13-month stay with Gerald Kingsland on the island of Tuin, in the Torres Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, was anything but idyllic. The couple had married in order to secure permission to live on the island, but they were deeply incompatible. Life on the island was harsh: food was scarce, and when the couple weren’t fighting, they were dealing with drought, illness and injury. Lucy Irvine reckons if it wasn’t for a tribe from nearby Badu island, who brought them food and water, they would have perished in their "paradise".
Lucy Irvine’s island adventure is recounted in her best-selling book, "Castaway". The book was also made into a successful film directed by Nicholas Roeg, and starring Oliver Reed as Gerald Kingsland and Amanda Donohoe as Lucy Irvine. Donohoe’s role called for lots of nudity – along with the modern luxuries and comforts, she and Kingsland also went without clothes for much of their time on the island.
In 1999 she went with her sons to live on Pigeon Island in the Outer Solomons, after being commissioned to write a biography of a British couple who had settled there. That book became "Faraway" about her year spent on remote Pigeon Island in the then British Solomon Islands where I had almost taken a job myself in late 1969 - click here.
She also began work on two novels, but single parenthood left her little time for writing. To give her children some semblance of a normal life, she tried living "conventionally" but calls it a "disastrous era" in her own life. In 2007, with two of her kids grown up and the youngest in university, she moved into an old mud-brick house in rural Bulgaria, in the foothills of the Balkans. A fire in 2009 destroyed the cottage, so now she lives in a caravan on the site.
Born in 1956, Lucy Irvine is now a matronly sixty-seven years old and unlikely to do any more island-bashing, but both her books are instructive reading for anyone wishing to live on a desert island.
Forget Tom Hanks! Read about real castaways, and watch this movie!
