Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession
GAVIN FRANCIS
(CANONGATE, 256 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

As we learn to honour our doctors anew, we have become more than merely curious about the physical business of caring. Gavin Francis is a doctor first and foremost; but he’s got a poet’s eye, a philosopher’s questioning mind and a restless spirit. Here, he contrasts a life of medical responsibility with his lifelong fascination with islands.

Maps are his passion; there are lots. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Map; a 1572 copy of an early wall map featuring the Orcades embellished with lobsters, fanged orcas, ­delicate ships and a piper; a Turkish ­navigational map; Nelson Mandela’s prison island. There’s a mesmerising Nasa picture of shifting wave patterns. The colours are sumptuous – you’d be forgiven for wanting the book just because it’s so pretty.