‘Sacks is rightly renowned for his empathy . . . anyone with a taste for the exotic will find this beautifully written book highly engaging’ – The Sunday Times

Journey into the unknown with the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Always fascinated by islands, neurologist Oliver Sacks is drawn to the Pacific by reports of the tiny atoll of Pingelap, with its isolated community of islanders born totally colour-blind; and to Guam, where he investigates a puzzling paralysis endemic there for a century. Along the way, he re-encounters the beautiful, primitive island cycad trees – and these become the starting point for a meditation on time and evolution, disease and adaptation, and islands both real and metaphorical in The Island of the Colour-Blind.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

"This is a wonderful book, made better by Sacks' exceptionally gentle descriptions of patients. He also captures the unimaginable sadness of the Pacific." - The Spectator

"There is no one at the present time who writes like Oliver Sacks . . . [Sacks] writes of disease and disability with profound empathy and impressive erudition. He is a superb clinician who can take a seemingly arid and obscure medical condition, and convert it into a moving, personal odyssey, a testament of tenacity, courage and will" - Literary Review

"Dr Sacks is an elegant and beguiling writer, and when he describes a condition such as achromatopsia (total colour-blindness), he is not content merely to describe it from the outside, but he tries to imagine what the world is like to a person with the condition." - The Sunday Telegraph

"Sacks is rightly renowned for his empathy . . . anyone with a taste for the exotic will find this beautifully written book highly engaging" - The Sunday Times

"Sacks's fans are in for a treat: This is a magical medical mystery tour of South Sea islands that goes beyond the neurological lore to reveal the good doctor as historian, botanist, environmentalist, anthropologist, and, as always, caring human being" - Kirkus

"Remarkable . . . powerful . . . constantly engaging" - Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine