Cast Away (Francesca de Tores, Bloomsbury)

Award-winning author Francesca de Tores’s Cast Away is a fascinating and exquisitely detailed fictionalisation of sailor and navigator Alexander Selkirk’s 4 years marooned on a deserted island in the 1700s. A real historical figure, Selkirk was a key inspiration behind Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As in de Tores’s previous novel, Saltblood, her diligent research combined with stunning prose and a profound emotional pulse work together to create rewarding and luminous historical fiction. The novel opens as Selkirk is marooned by his shipmates, though we do not yet know why. It shifts between Selkirk’s present struggles for survival and his account of life before. Though initially unwilling to revisit his past, Selkirk gradually reveals more as the island, with its prolonged and unflinching isolation, breaks down his deeply held barriers of pride and self-denial. Selkirk is not an easily likeable protagonist, yet his misadventures, bad luck and bad behaviour make for compelling reading. De Tores doesn’t shy away from the gritty bodily ordeals that are a reality of survival, yet she balances such grittiness with humour, striking meditations on what it is to be human, and even magical realism. The book’s fantastical elements are perhaps unnecessarily explained when they might have been left to the reader’s own interpretation, yet Cast Away is nevertheless a triumphant and enjoyable read for fans of Jock Serong’s Preservation and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Charlotte Callander is a freelance writer who has worked as a bookseller and museum educator. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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