Remote: A Story of St Helena

Remote: A Story of St Helena

The small Island of St Helena, flung away in mid-South Atlantic Ocean, is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world – its loneliness breeding a phlegmatic populace as famous for friendliness as the island itself is known for stunning scenery and a captivating history. Small wonder, then, that the author – in love with St Helena from an early age – resolved to buy a second family home there in 1999, and found herself living there for nearly ten years while her family “commuted” back and forth from Cape Town on the RMS St Helena - the only ship that serves the island. Running concurrently with her unusually eventful tenure, was the British Government’s determination to build St Helena’s first airport, and the litany of those frustrating consultations is described with candour, while colourful splashes of the island’s history, modest environmental offerings and breath-taking beauty are painted into day-to-day happenings. All this is woven into an intimate family story of a treasured house, the island’s day-to-day demands, and coming to terms with a remote lifestyle – a forthright tale told with both humour and some measures of angst as she boldly endeavours to ‘jump the cracks’ that shockingly appear is this idyllic place as time moves on. South African born Lindsay Grattan Cooper has lived in Cape Town for much of her life. She has worked in advertising and then for thirteen years in one of Cape Town's leading bookshops. 'What happier place to spend your days?' she exclaims. 'Only the man I married had the power to wrest me from such an idyllic working life!' Together they have raised two children, both now adult. Remote is her second book. Her first, the novel Our Kind of Music, was published in 2014.