Our Book of the Week this week will takes you places that you have never been and to which you are unlikely ever to go (except by opening this book). Judith Schalansky's ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will is a beautifully produced volume that does everything an atlas can do to engage the imagination: the maps of each island are spare and mysterious and beautifully drawn, the text accompanying each delineates fact but, largely due to the incompletely resolved nature of the histories, there is plenty of room for the reader to activate their imagination to occupy the spaces, and the whole book is well and subtly made. The stories of travellers to or inhabitants of these remote spots of land surrounded by vast oceans are stories of loneliness, refuge and utopianism, of human dreams washed up on rocky shores, of the oddities of nature or society that can flourish only away from the masses, either of land or of people. This is a completely absorbing book. 

>> Keep an eye on our FaceBook page this week, for our daily Remote Island of the Day.

>> "You can tell world history by islands. That is why I call them footnotes to the mainland."

>> "Books are not a form of fetishism."

>> Is the appearance of a book as important as its content? 

>> "I don't even trust my own memory."

>> Schalansky goes to an island.

>> And how many bones are there in a giraffe's neck?