'Touching, terribly sad, funny: a smashing novel' The Times In 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent by her sea captain father to live with her two holy aunts in a house by the sea on England's northeast coast. The house is so close to the sea it seems to toss like a ship, and so isolated, she might be marooned on an island. There Polly lives for 81 years, while the century rages around her and Victorian order becomes nuclear dread. Through it all, she returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination.