When I first arrived at Blackstaff over three years ago, one of the first books I worked on was Mike Faulkner’s first book, The Blue Cabin: Living by the Tides on Islandmore. I loved this book from the first time I read the manuscript and, whenever I look at it to check something quickly – such as the way a page was laid out, or to check the ISBN – I find myself drawn back in.
Mike has written a new book for us, which we’ll publish in October. I’m enjoying it just as much as the first one, and this time it will be illustrated throughout with colour photographs. Encouragingly, lots of the readers who have reviewed the book on Amazon mention that they’re looking forward to the sequel – their wait will soon be over.
In case you haven’t discovered The Blue Cabin yet, I’m including a short extract below.
. . . Our photograph album, and my journal, are so full of easy hours stretched out on the wind-flattened grass of remote rocks and islands, surrounded by sea pinks, cow parsley and wild irises, the smell of salt and the sounds of the sea that, in retrospect I wonder how we got anything done. It was a time to consolidate and to enjoy old friendships, particularly with those we left behind, and we found that because we tended to set aside a few days to justify their journeys from Scotland, the time we spent together had more substance, unhurried and largely untrammelled, as it was, by the social niceties of arrival times, polite greetings and small talk.
And of course most of our friends, never having lived on a bona fide island, have been on adventures of their own, giving us the double pleasure of providing and sharing. It can be a culture shock for them, there’s no doubt about it. There is something either magical or unsettling, depending on your point of view, in the knowledge that the strip of water in front of you is more than just a strip of water, as in a river or a freshwater loch. For some it represents an unnatural, perhaps even scary, suspension of normal life, but for us it is a barrier on the other side of which we have been able to take leave of the rest of the world without appearing unfriendly.
(c) Michael Faulkner, taken from The Blue Cabin: Living by the Tides on Islandmore
HW
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