Cast Away by Francesca de Tores review – gripping portrait of the real-life Robinson Crusoe

This fascinating novel about 18th-century privateer Alexander Selkirk, abandoned on a tiny island in the South Pacific, becomes a revelatory meditation on humanity It’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose marooning on a tiny island in the South Pacific would eventually inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet, cur...

By AK Blakemore