LIFE ON A ROCK

Having spent five years managing the tiny island of Highborne Cay, Exuma, in the Bahamas the author paints a vivid, heartfelt and surprising picture of Caribbean life.

To say that there’s never a dull moment on Highborne Cay–where Albury and her husband have left their comfortable, big-city life in Nassau to work 12 to 14 hour days in a place reachable only by seaplane or boat–is a vast understatement. In the first 50 pages, armed robbers terrorize this native Bahamian couple, a guest nearly chops off his fingers in a fish-cleaning accident and a woman docks at the marina with her husband’s dead body aboard her boat. If not for its highly specific details, this exotic memoir easily could be mistaken for fiction. The author moves us swiftly through her unusual world, scattering photos of the island and its inhabitants throughout the book, lending a personal touch. What’s not shown in pictures is deftly illustrated in words. Albury introduces wonderfully drawn characters like Rosie–“a real island gal” in “skimpy shorts” who “always stepped out of her seaplane in bare feet with her brown, curly hair askew”–adding life to the narrative. Some passages border on the poetic, as when the author rhapsodizes about how “blue hues, mixed with the orange of a new morning, reflected on the ocean’s surface in whatever mood it happened to be in that particular day.” While a boatful of stranded Haitians and an illiterate employee lend this white author’s memoir a racial overtone, to her credit she doesn’t flinch from the uncomfortable truth of the Caribbean’s inequality and desperate poverty. From watching a Sperm whale being devoured by tiger sharks to staying on the alert for drug runners, Albury reveals that island life is less a breeze than a whirlwind.

Just another fascinating day in paradise.