You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Monoray acquires Considine’s ‘wonderful’ memoir of Cornish island life
Monoray has acquired The Island House: A New Life on A Tiny Cornish Isle by Mary Considine.
Publisher Jake Lingwood bought UK and Commonwealth rights to the memoir, which details how Considine and her family fled London after a traumatic year and set up life on a Cornish island, from Rowan Lawton at the Soho Agency. It will be published on 9th June 2022.
The synopsis reads: “Mary and Patrick’s dream was to live in London, have 2.4 children, a nice house, and successful jobs. But life had other plans, and in one traumatic year that all came crashing down. Bruised and battered, Mary finds herself pulled towards Cornwall and dreams of St George’s Island, where she spent halcyon childhood summers.
“So, when an opportunity arises to become tenants if they renovate the old Island House, they grab it with both hands. Life on the island is hard, especially in winter, the sea and weather, unforgiving. But the rugged natural beauty, the friendly ghosts of previous inhabitants, and the beautiful isolation of island life bring hope and purpose, as they discover a resilience, they never knew they had.”
Lingwood said: “Mary’s beautiful, evocative memoir has a timeless quality which readers will adore. We are endlessly fascinated with island living and Mary places you right there, on the island, with the waves crashing around you. It’s wonderful.”
Considine, who now lives in Devon, added that she fell in love with Cornwall on her first visit as a child but was distracted by the “badlands of London”, where she spent the 1990s writing and directing plays and teaching drama in secondary schools. She and her husband eventually made the decision to “live intimately with the tides, weather and wildlife, in a way that seemed purer, as well as more primitive, than the urban lives we’d known before”.
She said: “That connection with the natural world is something which people are increasingly yearning for, and something we will never lose. I’m so delighted that Monoray understood that from the start, and have enabled me to share the story of my 40 years of island life.”
