Foula

DOWNLOADABLE E-BOOK
Immediately available to your e-mail

Foula: The Last Outpost Before Madness is a wickedly witty and unflinchingly honest deep dive into one of Britain’s most remote, wind-blasted, and stubbornly inhabited islands. Perched at the far edge of the Shetlands – and by extension, sanity – Foula is not the kind of place you stumble across. It’s the kind of place that dares you to come closer, then laughs when you try.

With a population that could fit in a minivan, cliffs that actively resent your presence, and seabirds that regard humans as trespassers with terrible taste in outerwear, Foula is less a location and more a challenge. In this sharp and sardonic chronicle, the island is explored not through the lens of glossy tourism, but with dark humor, historical grit, and a strong dose of existential weather.

From its volcanic birth in deep geological time to its Norse settlers, forgotten tragedies, wartime interludes, and its current minimalist population, Foula tells the story of a place that refuses to vanish – even as the world forgets to ask where it went. Part travelogue, part history, part survival guide for the mildly deranged, this book is for anyone who has ever dreamed of escape, flirted with isolation, or wondered what might happen if you pushed just a little bit further west than was advisable.

Written in a tone that sways between lyrical awe and gleeful exasperation, the book explores the strange allure of life on the edge – where the birds are louder than the humans, the post arrives by plane (weather permitting), and the concept of time is treated as more of a suggestion than a rule.

Includes an appendix full of dubious travel advice, a timeline of geological indifference and human misjudgment, and a multiple-choice Island IQ test designed to separate the romantics from the realists.

Part of the Islands of the World series, Foula: The Last Outpost Before Madness is a love letter to remoteness, written with frostbitten fingers and a grin that might be permanent.