The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

About the book

A disaster at sea leaves two children and a sailor separated from ordinary society on a tropical island. Practical survival establishes the first terms of their new life, but the passage of time creates questions that the remnants of their earlier knowledge cannot fully answer. Stacpoole describes the natural setting with an intensity that makes it both shelter and a source of uncertainty. The children develop routines and attachments while remaining distant from the institutions that would ordinarily interpret growing up for them. The novel combines castaway adventure with an imagined account of development outside familiar social instruction. Its island is therefore more than a picturesque refuge: it is the setting for a sustained contrast between the abundance of immediate experience and the limits of what experience alone can explain.

• Isolation
• Growing up
• Nature and society

Why read it

For a castaway romance that makes the distance from ordinary society a question about learning as well as survival.

English text