'Writer seeks "wife" for a year on tropical island.'

The opportunity to escape from it all was irresistible. Lucy Irvine answered the advertisement -- and found herself alone on a remote desert island with a 'husband' she hardly knew.

Lucy Irvine fell in love with the seductive, if cruel, beauty of that untouched Eden, whose power to enslave and enchant her never slackened throughout the whole of her amazing adventure.

Uncompromisingly candid and sometimes shocking, Castaway is her compulsively readable account of a desert island dream which threatened to turn into a nightmare of illness, thirst and personal antipathy.