Blasket Bound, Memoirs of an Island Caretaker Author: Lesley BondISBN-13: 9781084584224Publisher: Gill Books Guideline Price: €18.99The Blasket Islands had long had a hold on the imagination of Lesley Bond before she ever set foot on them. She and her husband, Gordon, were selected to be the island’s first caretakers in 2019 by the Great Blasket Experience, which rents cottages, runs a cafe and bring visitors out to the island on boats throughout the season, which runs from April to October. She pays close attention to all elements of the island in this intriguing memoir of place, heritage and history, becoming familiar with an initially impenetrable landscape, tuning into the rhythms of the seasons as they flit by, moving towards a deeper connection with the nature surrounding her. Wildlife, in the form of seals and birds, becomes a thread of connection that tethers her to the island. Touching on the rich heritage of all the island writers, she has a particular affinity with Eilís Ní Shuilleabháin, a prolific letter writer, and correctly honours Peig Sayers, far wittier and full of life than her dourly edited tome on island life could ever have conveyed. Bond accurately depicts the force and impact landscape can have when humans are confronted with a wilder type of place, and how it changes them. She writes well about the quitting of the Blaskets by the islanders and their subsequent depopulation in the 1950s. When her season ends, she finds the leaving difficult, tied to an ancient place through a new heritage, a living, breathing form of it. Miriam Mulcahy’s latest book is Walking to the Foot of the Sky