Nine Books about Island Adventures

by Alastair Bonnett
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9 books
Islands are the natural home of adventures. They have always drawn explorers and dreamers and are the setting of our most compelling stories. The nine island tales gathered here range includes tales of both horror and paradise but all exhibit the power that small, sea-girt places have over the imagination.
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The Man Who Loved Islands

And Other Stories
D. H. Lawrence, 2021
An intriguing exploration of why tiny islands attract us, for good and for bad. Lawrence writes that an island ‘has to be really quite small, before it FEELS LIKE an island’ and traces the story - based on a real individual – of a rich man who buys and moves to successfully smaller islands. It is an adventure story but also a tale of self-absorption and narcissism. The perfect island, concludes Lawrence ‘is a nest which holds one egg, and one only. This egg is the islander himself.’

Island of the Blue Dolphins

Scott O'Dell, 1960
A children’s book about the true-life story of a women who, on her death bed was baptised with the name Juana Maria. ‘Juana Maria’ lived alone on the uninhabited and remote San Nicolas Island off the coast of Alta California from 1835 until her removal from the island in 1853. She was a Native Californian and the last surviving member of her tribe as well as being the the last speaker of the Nicoleño language. In the spirit of Robinson Crusoe narratives, Island of the Blue Dolphins  is a romantic tale of survival and adaptability, yet it’s the painful history that underlies this yarn that gives it poignancy and power.

Island

Aldous Huxley, 2014
Huxley’s last novel is an example of the role islands play in our understanding of perfection: islands are petri dishes of experimentation and hope. The word ‘utopia’ originates from Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, which depicts an ideal island community. Huxley’s Pacific island of Pala is also an enviable place and, like More’s, it has hidden layers of meaning. Huxley explores the corrosive power of greed among both islanders and incomers in a novel that is unsentimental but also ambitious and hopeful.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

H. G. Wells, 2023
First published in 1896 this is a horror story of a mad science on a remote island. Edward Prendick, shipwrecked on the mysterious island home of Doctor Moreau, soon discovers that the island is crawling with Moreau’s monstrous semi-human creations. It’s bold, pacy tale but, as always with Wells, it’s full of ideas. The Island of Doctor Moreau looks forward to modern debates on genetics and what makes us human, all the while questioning the borderline between other species and ourselves.

An African in Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie, 2001
This is an account of a travel writer’s journey, from Togo to the Arctic, which he finally set foot on in 1965. As with all good travel writing, the journey reveals the author: ‘I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered’, writes Kpomassie. He’s called the giant because he’s so much taller than the Greenlanders but this is a tale of friendship as well as of hardship. There is plenty of the latter: Kpomassie is attacked by wild dogs and at one point tells us how starving huskies break open coffins and ‘gorge themselves on human flesh’.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding, 2003
A timeless story of order, anarchy and psychological coercion, Lord of the Flies is also a parable of how place, in this case an uninhabited island populated by a small band of marooned British boys, shapes society. The arc of the story appears to be from civilisation to barbarism, but the seeds of the latter are present in the former and the book can be read as a critique of the snobbishness and cruelty of the culture the boys come from.

The Mysterious Island

Jules Verne, 1988
First published in 1875, this is a classic island adventure story. As so often with such tales part of the pleasure is the way the island is surveyed and understood. Climbing the island’s central mountain our stranded adventurers find the island ‘displayed under their eyes, like a plan in relief with different tints, green for the forests, yellow for the sand, blue for the water. They viewed it in its tout-ensemble, nothing remained concealed but the ground hidden by verdure, the hollows of the valleys, and the interior of the volcanic chasms’. Verne’s ‘mysterious island’ turns out to be linked to another of his other famous books: it is a hideout for Captain Nemo.

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson, 2002
An island adventure written in 1881 that still defines the genre and, like others on this list, it’s a children’s book that appeals to readers of all ages. It offers us the thrilling promise of the ‘treasure map’; that irresistible combination of cartography and adventure. ‘The doctor opened the seals with great care’, Stevenson writes, ‘and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores’.

A People Who Would Not Kneel

Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry)
James Howe, 1998
A lot of islands belong to indigenous people yet island adventure is a genre dominated by White outsiders. In this important counter history James Howe tells the on-going story of the Kuna people who live on a long archipelago of beautiful, sandy islands on the Caribbean side of Panama. The Kuna – the so-called ‘last undefeated tribe’ of Latin America – still maintain their unique culture, language and political autonomy. However, today, as I report in The Age of Islands, sea level rise is swamping their tiny islands and threatening their long secluded kingdom.