One spring Leslie Thomas took time off from writing novels and began a journey to the small islands around Britain and Ireland.

          His journey was to take him to St Agnes and its adjoining island, The Gugh, in the Scillies; he visited, too, the neighbouring islands of St Marys and Tresco. He went on to Fair Isle, the outrider of all our islands, majestically, beautifully alone, far in the north; Caldy Island, with its friendly monks driving their yellow amphibian into the sea, making perfume from the flowers of their Welsh isle; Auskerry, uninhabited, wide of the Orkneys, where he journeyed with the sheep-shearers in a bucking fishing boat, where he found a wreck and an unexplained grave. Then he went across to Ireland and the lovely haunted islands of the Blaskets, bereft of their people now, but with their houses still standing in the sun; north again to Luing, tucked into the Hebrides, and then far south to the Channel Isles of Herm, Sark and Alderney; finally, Brownsea Island, one of the four islands in Poole Harbour, once one of the most isolated spots in Britain.

          First published in 1968, Some Lovely Islands is a richly evocative account, alive with stories of sea and storm, happy with humour and humanity. The book has since been completely redesigned, the text revised and updated to include additional islands, and Peter Chieze-Brown has embellished it with his outstanding photographs. The combination makes for an enchanting, lively and highly personal account of some of the loneliest parts of Britain and Ireland.