Review: One Night on the Island

One Night on the Island by Josie Silver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Cleo is a London journalist who writes a very popular column in an online magazine about dating. But as her thirties approach she is feeling a bit jaded, disappointed with dating, and all that. So her boss suggests she spends a few weeks on a remote Irish island called Salvation, learning to love herself, a kind of 'I can't find anyone to marry, so I guess I'll just marry myself' moment.

However, when Cleo gets to the remote cottage she finds she is not the only occupant. The owner's American cousin has also been given the one-bed cottage to stay in while he tries to get over the break-up of his marriage.

With neither of them willing to leave, Cleo and Mack fall into an uneasy truce, especially when the weather is so bad that the ferry can't come to the island to remove either of them anyway.

In an effort to forge some kind of common ground they start telling each other three random facts about themselves at night, while he sleeps in the bed and she sleeps on the couch. Gradually as the days progress Cleo finds the lack of WiFi, or even a phone signal anywhere except on top of a windswept hill, quite liberating. Even the islanders turn out to be a friendly eclectic bunch of people who invite Cleo to join their knitting circle and welcome Mack to the Salvation Arms for a Guinness and a roast dinner.

This was a pleasant enough romance/finding yourself novel, it did stray into hippy-dippy Eat, Pray, Love (the film because I haven't read the book) self-indulgent twaddle on occasion (I'm thinking of Cleo's self-marriage ceremony), but overall it stayed on the right side.

In fact my biggest bugbear was how friggin' long the book was (I've checked and it is 376 pages so it wasn't that it just felt long), I mean come on, the two of them are stuck on a remote island with no internet etc, there isn't much to do and yet it takes Josie Silver forevah to say it.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews