One Night on the Island: Escape to a remote island with this chemistry-filled love story

Three and a half stars. Cleo is a London journalist who writes a very popular column in an online magazine about dating. But as her thirties approach she is feeling a bit jaded, disappointed with dating, and all that. So her boss suggests she spends a few weeks on a remote Irish island called Salvation, learning to love herself, a kind of 'I can't find anyone to marry, so I guess I'll just marry myself' moment. However, when Cleo gets to the remote cottage she finds she is not the only occupant. The owner's American cousin has also been given the one-bed cottage to stay in while he tries to get over the break-up of his marriage. With neither of them willing to leave, Cleo and Mack fall into an uneasy truce, especially when the weather is so bad that the ferry can't come to the island to remove either of them anyway. In an effort to forge some kind of common ground they start telling each other three random facts about themselves at night, while he sleeps in the bed and she sleeps on the couch. Gradually as the days progress Cleo finds the lack of WiFi, or even a phone signal anywhere except on top of a windswept hill, quite liberating. Even the islanders turn out to be a friendly eclectic bunch of people who invite Cleo to join their knitting circle and welcome Mack to the Salvation Arms for a Guinness and a roast dinner. This was a pleasant enough romance/finding yourself novel, it did stray into hippy-dippy Eat, Pray, Love (the film because I haven't read the book) self-indulgent twaddle on occasion (I'm thinking of Cleo's self-marriage ceremony), but overall it stayed on the right side. In fact my biggest bugbear was how friggin' long the book was (I've checked and it is 376 pages so it wasn't that it just felt long), I mean come on, the two of them are stuck on a remote island with no internet etc, there isn't much to do and yet it takes Josie Silver forevah to say it. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

What a lovely book! It took me a little while to get into it at the beginning as the original concept was quite lighthearted, a journalist marrying herself on a remote Irish island for her dating column, which seemed a bit mad! So I expected it to be quite a light story, which it did start out as, but there was so much more depth to it and the more I read the more I couldn't put it down. Cleo arrives on the island and it turns out the remote cabin she's booked to stay in has been double-booked and the owner's (very distant) American cousin, professional photographer Mack, has also arrived expecting to stay there. So after a bit of a rocky start a truce is called and they co-exist in the same house, initially with a chalk line drawn through the middle - Cleo on one side, Mack on the other - but get closer as time goes on. They both have issues to sort through, Cleo is 30 during her stay and feels a bit stuck in her job, wanting to write a novel but never seeming to have the time, and Mack is in denial that his marriage has failed and trying to work through staying friendly with his wife while they hopefully sort out their differences, even though she's moved on, and how to bring up their two boys who he misses a lot. I absolutely loved all the Irish characters on the island, along with the womens knitting group that I would have been joining straight away - well I would have been the only crochet member! They were such a funny yet close-knit group that were always there for each other, just what both Cleo and Mack needed. The ending was just perfect, giving everyone time to work through things and not rushed at all. Wonderful, feel-good book that made me laugh and cry. Loved it!