Author(s): Ron Falconer

Biography

After travelling the world in his handmade boat, Scottish adventurer Ron Falconer still yearns to achieve his life-long dream to have the ultimate sea change and live an a deserted island. But when he falls in love with Anne, a strong-willed French woman, it looks like his dream may remain just that. Two children later, Anne's ready to try it. But when the Falconers arrive at their new home, tiny Caroline Atoll in the Pacific, they quickly discover that life in paradise isn't easy. Shark-infested waters, crafty rats, giant crabs and flesh-eating ants - it's sink or swin for Ron and Anne, as they struggle to live off the land and raise their children without the things most of us take for granted.

Ron, Anne and their two adorable children, Alexandre and Anais, end us living on Caroline - part of the island nation of Kiribati - for four years. During that time they build their own beautiful little house - Ron brings the floorboard with him on his boat and salvages the roof from a shipwreck, while Anne weaves the shutters, Polynesian style, from coconut leaves. Ron also builds an outside kitchen, a chicken coup, a well, a solar shower (ultimately voted too labour-intensive by his savvy companions) and even a wind-powered flower grinder (until a conventional one proves to be a lot less trouble). While Anne fishes every morning for the evening meal, Ron works on one of his many projects or tends to his vege garden with his willing and able assistants, Alexandre and Anais, who are just four and two when they arrive on the island. Visitors come and go - a group of scientists, old sea-faring friends and a Kiribati businessman and his men - but all the while the family take care to tread lightly in their island paradise, which in return fulfils their simple needs. Finally, though, modern-day realities intervene, when the Kiribati businessman succeeds in gaining control of the island, with plans to fish the waters and eventually build a resort. Ron and Anne and asked to leave and their paradise is lost.

Today the fate of Caroline Atoll is still in the balance. But this pristine island wilderness is celebrated in loving detail in TOGETHER ALONE, an insightful, fascinating and ultimately uplifting story of how one man's dream to live a solitary existencein paradise becomes very much an extraordinary family affair.