"Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands" by Judith Schalansky

The author grew up in East Germany; her ability to travel curtailed by the Communist bloc. So she wandered in her imagination, helped by atlases and libraries. This is a selection of fifty of the most remote islands in the world "I have not visited and never will". Each entry involves a map of the island as well as how far the island is away from three selected destinations) but no indication of the direction one should travel), a timeline of the known history of the island, and two pages recounting one chosen incident in the history of the island. These can be idiosyncratic. Thus:

• Bear Island: the story of a bird killing and egg-collecting expedition
• St Helena: the arrival of the ship which will take Napoleon's body back to Paris
• Taongi Atoll: the mystery of the discovered grave of a shipwrecked sailor ... with no indication of who buried him and how (or whether) they escaped from the island
• Rapa Iti: the story of a boy born in the Vosges who speaks a language unknown to anyone ... until aged 33 he meets a woman from this island and finds it is her mother tongue
• Amsterdam Island inhabited only by male scientists and plastered with porn expect for the district chief's office which contains an unsurprisingly blank register of births and marriages; each night the scientists gather in the cinema to watch porn, each sitting in a separate row ...
• Tikopia whose 1200 inhabitants practise strict birth control measures to limit their population to what the island can sustain ... including suicide, infanticide, abortion and coitus interruptus
• Floreana where a complicated battle between the first immigrant couple and a baroness (soon self-proclaimed empress of the island) and her two lovers results in the mysterious death or disappearance of four of the five
• The ecological disaster of Easter Island (caused by total deforestation)

As the prologue says: “There is no untouched garden of Eden lying at the edges of this never-ending globe. Instead, human beings travelling far and wide have turned into the very monsters they chased off the maps.”

Great fun

July 2019; 239 pages