How not to get away from it all in the Hebrides

Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not to’ guide. Within a few pages it’s clear that Tamsin Calidas’s decision to decamp with her husband to a tiny Hebridean island is highly ill-advised. They take on too much: buying a derelict croft, hoping to renovate the place and live self-sufficiently, with no farming experience. It’s not much of a surprise, especially to anyone with experience of life in the Scottish islands, when the relationship founders and her husband leaves.

It’s a gripping start. Surely she won’t remain on the croft alone? Surely things can’t get worse? Astoundingly, both happen. Calidas suffers an unbearable catalogue of misfortune, including divorce, heartbreaking infertility, injury, the death of friends and family, poverty and hunger (at one point eating leaves and bark) and ostracism on the island. She is brought to the brink of suicide.