Giveaway - Castaway by Francesca de Tores
From prize-winning author Francesca de Tores comes a sweeping tale of isolation and tenacity, asking a timeless question: who are we - and who do we become - when everything is stripped away?
About Castaway
Cast Away reimagines in mesmeric detail and sparkling, muscular prose the extraordinary true story of Alexander Selkirk – a sailor marooned and utterly alone on a remote Pacific island. Cut off from human contact, Selkirk must learn to survive with only his wits, his memories, and the unforgiving rhythms of the natural world.
As days stretch into months and months into years, the island becomes a crucible, testing the limits of resilience, faith and sanity. Through hunger, fear and the relentless passage of time, Selkirk is forced to confront not only the wilderness around him, but the deeper wilderness within.
Both an intimate psychological portrait and a sweeping historical novel, Cast Away explores the fragile architecture of the self under extreme isolation. It is a luminous meditation on loneliness, endurance and the stories we tell ourselves in order to remain human. In re‑imagining Selkirk’s ordeal, Francesca de Tores also illuminates the origins of one of literature’s most enduring myths: the tale that would later inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
About Francesca de Tores
Francesca de Tores is a novelist, poet and academic. She is the author of five previous novels, published in more than twenty languages, including Saltblood, which won the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Widely acclaimed for her lyrical style, psychological depth and re‑examination of history through marginalised lives, her work consistently explores themes of survival, identity and transformation. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
How To Enter:
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Leave a comment on our social posts to go into the draw. 5 winners will be drawn via Random.org
Contest ends 13 May 2026 AEST. Good luck!
The contest is limited to Australian and New Zealand readers only.