Judith Schalansky

For each island, this book provides information on its distance from the mainland, whether its inhabited, its features, and the stories that have shaped its lore.

Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will

Atlas of Remote Islands

Jeannette Ordas

If you've ever dreamed of an island paradise, maybe you should read this book. Intelligent, beautiful and an utterly charming read.

Risa C

The Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky was both a passport into fantastical hinterlands made real and a beautifully rendered cartographic account of man's historic quest for a land and life beyond the realm of the known world.

My interest in maps and any sort of cartography has long since been desiccated by a sexagenarian geography professor who ordered us to memorize countries, capitals, seas, and rivers, but Schalansky's Atlas was just so visually arresting and captivatingly submersive that I found myself committing coordinates to memory and searching out these tiny nowhere lands amidst their colossal neighbors on world maps. Reading the book, it bewildered me to think that though men draw maps to make sense of the world, the senseless acts they committed (recorded here in prose that is somehow faraway yet rattling and chilling all at once) in destroying their world and each other were in line with the model of order and peace they created. History is an account of man and all his achievements and victories, but his ugliness is sometimes unobscured and this book was a reminder that we have committed atrocities upon atrocities to make us yet unworthy of this world that houses us.

The anecdotes, the small, sterilised slices of stories in this book nursed a thirst in me that it couldn't fully quench. I had questions that it sparked but couldn't wouldn't answer. There’s the internet and planes and boats and passports for that, maybe, but I would have wanted more meat than bone, more story than style. But it was still so beautiful that I could forgive its coyness, its flitting, fleeting traipse through these islands and through history.

Atlas of Remote Islands Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will

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