The Island: The million-copy Number One bestseller 'A moving and absorbing holiday read'

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Because the house was besieged by catastrophe, I forgot the fear of darkness, flung the door open, and ran out. After having a terrible accident on a private island in Australia, four members of a family have to unite their forces to save their lives.

I raised an eyebrow when they went back to the mainland to get more dogs, motorcycles and a horse to join the party, they enjoyed the hunt!

When Heather Baxter marries Tom - a much older widower father with a teen daughter and young son - she is thrilled. And for the very first time that winter, during my escape, I started, uncontrollably, to miss my island.

Ultimately though what was key to my engagement, and I suspect why this is already being adapted for Hulu limited TV series release, is the depth of lead protagonist Heather’s transformative story arc. Later scenes include a play within a play, as Winston and John perform a condensed two-person version of Antigone by Sophocles. Heather has been underestimated her entire life, but she knows that only she can bring her family home again and become the mother the children desperately need, even if it means doing the unthinkable to keep them all alive. I rowed by instinct, someplace in there was dry land, safe, with sleeping houses, and farther away the lit-up city.

The Rani, however, who comes to visit Farnaby and is theatrical, larger-than-life, and more traditionally religious, is disgusted by these mainstream Palanese values and wishes to reform the country. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Victoria Council Estate, Carrickfergus, County Antrim. Contrary to these philosophies, most Palanese islanders engage in peaceful living, intellectual pursuits, and deep spiritualism that avoids superstition. A dream trip gone wrong, Heather, Tom, and their two kids Olivia and Owen tag along on Heather’s work trip to Australia. The Palanese also circumspectly incorporated the use of " moksha medicine", a fictional entheogen taken ceremonially in rites of passage for mystical and cosmological insight.