Shortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize.

Discover the true story of St. Kilda.

When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’ lost its permanent population after five millennia.

It has long been accepted that the islanders’ failure to adapt to the modern world was its demise. Andrew Fleming overturns the traditional view. Unafraid of highlighting dark times, he shows how they sacrificed their reputation as an uncorrupted, ideal society to embrace and exploit the tourist trade. Creating a prestigious tweed, exporting the ancestors of today’s Hebridean sheep, the islanders gained access to consumer goods and learned how to play politics to their advantage.

This book tells the absorbing and eventful story of St Kilda from earliest times, up to the evacuation and its aftermath. Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich culture of the islanders themselves, as well as the numerous outsiders who engaged with the remote island community.

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'rich with social history, counteracting stereotypes of the island community's final decline to produce a much more nuanced and interesting view'

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'Fleming has written a magnificent and completely engaging book, the result of long engagement with St Kilda and its people. It is full of fine stories, acute character sketches, information about how the islanders lived, what they did, even what they thought'

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'this is a book that tells the definitive story of St Kilda that will be of lasting value having, quite literally, rewritten the history of the archipelago'

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'a comprehensive and thought-provoking history of a vanished community that is full of intriguing facts and stories'

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'He is prodigiously well informed, an excellent writer, and his archaeologist’s eye and academic analysis could not be bettered. As a contributor to the modern St Kilda conversation, Andrew Fleming is compelling'

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'In his gripping new history, Andrew Fleming re-examines an often-told story, using anecdote, analysis and the British Newspaper Archive to convey the atmosphere and challenges of a place he believes may have been colonised by Mesolithic hunter-warriors'

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'the author’s research has been wide ranging over many aspects of island life... this is a book not to be missed'

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'a nuanced and compelling analysis of this historic event, Fleming's re-interpretation of St Kilda's history overturns the traditional view that it was a failure to adapt that resulted in the end of the St Kilda way of life'

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'Thorough, consistently readable and thought provoking. Andrew Fleming adopts neither a rose-tinted view of the islanders nor an overly critical one; he treats them as fellow humans, lodged in their own place and time – and in so doing, he has delivered an excellent history of St Kilda and its islanders'

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'Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich cultures of the islanders themselves'

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'a well-written and sobering account of tough times'

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'A worthy addition to the St Kilda bookshelf... an entertaining, and at times, opinionated treatise on probably Scotland’s most intriguing island'