Sole Survivor
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- £0.99
Publisher Description
Passion, adventure, struggle for survival and love for life – on a remote island.
You’re fed up with your office job, your flatmate, your bank manager and yourself. Fate throws you a lifeline. You’re now the sole inheritor of a cottage on a remote island off New Zealand. Do you take it? Of course you do.
So, off sets Rosie Trethewey, not knowing what she’s in for but pretty certain it can’t be worse than what she’s got. She’s not counted on her reclusive neighbours: a traumatised refugee of the war in Burma, and a misanthrope of an ex-policeman. They can’t abide each other, let alone the thought of a newcomer. And a woman at that.
But you can’t survive on an island without some degree of contact. Rosie is the catalyst that forces the loners to come to terms with themselves, each other and the encroaching world.
Reviews
‘This is the book I’ve been waiting for Derek Hansen to write. It’s a gem!’
Bryce Courtenay
About the author
Derek Hansen was born in England, raised in New Zealand and now lives with his wife and two children in Australia. Derek turned to writing novels after a thirty-year career in advertising and met with instant success. SOLE SURVIVOR is his third novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A spirited woman invades the solitude and solidarity of two male residents of a New Zealand backwater bay in Australian novelist Hansen's (Psycho Cat) newest mixture of adventure and romance. Abandoning her claustrophobic life as a mainland marketing representative, Rose Tretheway moves into a cottage she has inherited on remote Wreck Bay on the coast of the Great Barrier Island. There she encounters hostile neighbors: Red O'Hara, a former WWII POW in Burma, who is barely functional, and Angus McLeod, a crusty Scottish ex-policeman who retired to the island to write children's books. Tretheway quickly begins a problematic affair with the shell-shocked O'Hara and then indulges in a fling with a local naval officer. Her romantic life gets more complicated when the curmudgeonly McLeod, after trying to force her off the island, does an about-face and tries to talk her into having a child, hoping to live out his parenting fantasies as a secondary father figure behind either O'Hara or the officer. Real life intrudes on the romantic antics in the form of a poaching Japanese fishing trawler that threatens both the livelihood of the inhabitants and the delicate ecology of the island. The narrative chugs along effectively despite some dubious scenes that call into question the motives of the various protagonists, and despite a climax that's downright bizarre. Hansen does a fine job of depicting island life in the 1960s, and he invents an appealingly idiosyncratic cast of characters, but much of this long and ponderously narrated book fails to generate suspense.
