Dan Boothby had been drifting for more than twenty years, without the pontoons of family, friends or a steady occupation. He was looking for but never finding the perfect place to land. Finally, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. After a lifelong obsession with Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water trilogy, Boothby was given the chance to move to Maxwell's former home, a tiny island on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland.
Island of Dreams is about Boothby's time living there, and about the natural and human history that surrounded him; it's about the people he meets and the stories they tell, and about his engagement with this remote landscape, including the otters that inhabit it. Interspersed with Boothby's own story is a quest to better understand the mysterious Gavin Maxwell.
Beautifully written and frequently leavened with a dry wit, Island of Dreams is a charming celebration of the particularities of place.

Dan Boothby had been drifting for more than twenty years, searching for but never quite finding the perfect place to land. Then he was offered the position of warden on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, the last home of Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water. For Boothby, fascinated since boyhood by Maxwell and his books, this was a dream come true.

Island of Dreams is about Boothby's time living on this tiny island on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland. It is about the people he meets and the stories they tell; the wildlife he encounters, including the island's native otters; and the history of the land and the sea that surround him.

With the passing of the seasons Boothby begins to better understand Maxwell - aristocrat, artist, explorer, naturalist - whose life in his books appeared so enviable and idyllic. Yet behind the myth lie a complicated, elusive man and a life filled with dramatic changes of fortune.

Beautifully written and frequently leavened with a dry wit, Island of Dreams is a deeply personal memoir about the quest for a mentor and the search for home, and is, at heart, a charming celebration of the particularities of place.

The pleasure in reading Island of Dreams comes from Dan Boothby's refusal to add yet another purely self-indulgent narrative to the growing memoir canon. Instead, he seamlessly weaves wholly autobiographical elements with both biography and sense of place. . .Island of Dreams is not only Maxwell's story. It is a portrait of the rugged Scottish coast, the local wildlife and the people who spend at least part of the year in such harshly beautiful places. Above all, it describes how each of these facets mirrors Boothby's own search for meaning. It is thrilling to realize along with him that he has made an inspired choice. . . [a] fine memoir of one edge-dweller's fortuitous entwinement with the life of another