This story is excerpted and adapted from Alastair Bonnett’s Elsewhere: A Journey into our Age of Islands, published in November 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Outside the United States and Canada, Elsewhere is published as The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands (Atlantic Books). So, you want to build an island. You’ll have some questions, such as where, how, and of course, what shape? Strange-looking islands are sprouting in shallow seas all over the world. Many of the newest and most intriguing specimens are…
