This book is a meditation on isolation and community through the study of literary treatments of the theme. The treatments are fanciful rather than literal or clinical accounts of exile from society, myths, fables, tales of men without women on desert islands. Even Thoreau's Walden is something of a lark, a wilfully eccentric experiment. Most of the stories take place on islands, but sometimes the open sea, mountains or the forest make do as an 'I-land'.