A television series that has strangers living and fending for themselves whilst living on an uninhabited island turns deadly.

The novel had a really interesting premise; it sounded a bit like Agatha Christie's And Then There were None which is an all time favourite so I was intrigued. I felt that the pace was a little slow but it was still an interesting read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the audiobook in exchange for an honest review

Mixing elements of a reality show with 'Survivor', this is the story of a handful of strangers who sign up to spend a year on a remote island with no infrastructure and have their every moment filmed to be broadcast at a later date. However, as the prologue indicates, this will not go well.
It's a brilliant, if, at times, difficult listen. Narrated entirely from Maddie's perspective, which at times seemed to become almost hallucinatory, created a brilliantly tense drama. She becomes the outcast of the group and through her eyes we see the other islanders worst characteristics. Whether this is the gaslighting by Duncan, the cruelty of Andrew, the toxicity of Jill or the weakness of Maxine and Zoe. There are some truly terrifying moments in the book; Lord of the Flies seems tame in comparison! There are also some moments where the book did fall down for me (the fact that the production team didn't do anything about the camera men), but I was more than willing to overlook these small elements as the overall result is so damn satisfying.
The narration is excellent, the plot well executed and the ending is incredibly satisfying. It's safe to say I have a new 'must read author' added to my list.

My thanks go to the publishers and NetGalley for the advance copy in return for an honest review.

Stranded by Sarah Goodwin.

The story begins as 8 strangers board a small boat to an uninhabited island where they are to be filmed on their survival on this island.(I think there has been a TV show like this some years ago, the original big brother). The story is told from the point of view of Maddie a young woman who has led a very sheltered life and just lost her parents. She has nothing better to do so has decided this would be a good idea. The eight land on the island with 2 support crew, for tech issues and start to organise a camp, food etc. Then we hear snippets from a post experience interview with Maddie that suggests she's a sole survivor from the island, the plot has just turned interesting. The short chapters tell of the life on the island and how all the characters interact and the development of tensions within the group. These are interspersed with very short extracts of the interview with Maddie, letting us know that something happens but we don't know what, this keeps our interest as the story unfolds quite slowly.

The characters, Maddie I like, she seems like a nice sensible person who is thoughtful but not a pushover, perhaps not much fun though, the other woman in the group include a young, ditsy, bikini wearer; a 55year old knitter, jam making, worthers original eater; and a loud, lazy suckup.
The men are yet again stereotypes a young butcher, a couple of builders/carpenters and an older, more self contained fisherman.
I'm not convinced by Maxine's character, a 55year old that is fit, outdoorsy and would sign up to this, is also the knitting, boiled sweets gran- a bit too contrived.
Obviously, there are frictions in camp, they have been put together as they all have individual skills that as a whole would work well but there's always someone that deems their skills in higher regard causing tension and arguments.

Without spoiling it, I would have liked to see another characters POV as I don't understand why the rift happened, a little sudden (considering the slow pace) and I'm not sure Maddie's POV helped in clarification. If there was a big issue at this point, or the POV of others to reason it, would have made it more believable.

The plot, although slow is actually quite a good listen, various things do happen along the way that keep your interest but it's only the last 20% when the truth about what has happened starts to unravel. It's a unique storyline and that I enjoyed.

Overall, I enjoyed this book I think Maddie should have done something big before the rift to make it more believable but if you get over this a good ending 3.5*
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK audio for the ARC.

A gripping psychological thriller set on a remote Scottish island. I listened to the audiobook and I truley couldn’t turn off. It was like watching a reality TV show that goes horrible, horribly wrong.

The narration was perfect, developing each character and keeping a pace that kept the suspense building. My only gripe was that it was probably longer than it needed to be to. I enjoyed it massively nonetheless.

Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Collins Audio and Sarah Goodwin for an audio ARC in return for an honest review

There is something about the drawing in of winter that makes me want to spend the dark nights with a good psychological thriller. Stranded certainly fits the bill.

The story centres around Maddy, one of 8 people chosen to take part in a reality tv show where participants are left on a deserted island for 1 year to see how they fend for themselves. Slowly, as food starts to run low and tempers fray, Maddy finds herself at odds with her campmates and this is where things get dark.

I loved this book. Although there is little scope for much to happen - it is set on a deserted island after all - Sarah Goodwin had me hooked from the get go. She cleverly makes sure the narrative doesn't get too caught up in the mundane side of island living while still giving the reader a good sense of how the islanders spend their day.

It is a slow burner with the tension ramping up in such a way that you feel like a tightly coiled spring. A fantastically atmospheric book with hints of Lord of the Flies meets Survivor.

I used to be OBSSESSED with the tv show Survivor when I was younger so immediately jumped at the chance to listen to Stranded. Stranded is set on the remote island of Buidseach where 8 complete strangers plan to spend the year in a Survivor meets Big Brother style TV show.

Immediately, there is a sinister feel to this one and it was obvious that this was going to be a bumpy 12 months for this interesting array of characters. Without giving too much away, shit hits the fan Lord Of The Flies style and we get to see the chaos that unfolds played out right before our eyes.

The characters are brilliantly unlikeable and I think this added so much to the book, while one part of me was thinking oh god that's horrific, another part was like ha serves you right.

Stranded also worked brilliantly on audio, the narration was fantastic and the often diary like aspect suited the format brilliantly.

A twisted, gripping and fast-paced thriller with plenty to keep you thinking.

I did really enjoy this book though i found it upsetting. I really related to the main character as I have the same personality traits and feeling so isolated from others, so in a way, completely unintentionally, I did find it a bit traumatising!

However, I enjoyed the book, it was a little slow to get started but I really resonated with the main character. I found it an enjoyable concept and interesting. I listened on audio and thought the narrator was well spoken and easy to listen to.

Overall, an emotional (only for me) but good read!

Such a gripping tale of survival that had me hooked until the final page!
I liked the switching between main character maddie being interviewed and her time on the island!

Overall a fabulous book and one I will definitely be recommending.

#Stranded by #SarahGoodwin, WOW! Definitely a case of don’t judge a book by its cover! Possibly the best #thriller I’ve read in the last year! Tension ✔️ premise✔️ plot✔️ characters✔️ reality tv show, desert island, world in crisis - a modern day Lord of the Flies. A book to read in one sitting. Thank you to #Netgalley for gifting me this #arc I’m exchange for an honest review ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #thriller #generalfiction #harpercollinsuk #harpercollinsukaudio #netgalleyuk #goodreadschallenge #bookstagram #readersofinstagram #riereads #oneadventureafteranotherc

Stranded by Sarah Goodwin was Just superb! from start to finish. The Narrator was: Esme Sears and she was 10/10.

When eight strangers, all sign up to be contestants, to live on an Island off of the coast of Scotland. They have to survive for a year with no internet, no social media, mobile phones, electricity etc and most of all - no place to live. They only allowed to take limited number of supplies for them to help with their survival! This could be a foraging books, dried foods, spices etc. They have to survive and work as a team on this island and use all the resources around them to survive the next year. They have No contact with the outside world and all they have to wear a solar camera at all times. This will film them on how they are surviving together.
There are two camera men on the island but they have No contact with the eight contestants!

The eight contestants all arrive on the island and the first thing they have to do is find shelter or make shelter. Only working as a team will help them all survive the year ahead!!!!

Wow!!! this audio book was brilliant and had me hooked. Its fast paced throughout and had me thinking how are they going to survive the year with No food, No shelter etc. They have to live off the island of berries, mushrooms and plants etc.

How are they going to survived?

Are they all going to get on together?

Are any of the eight contests going to survive the year and make it back to home land?

OMG!!!!!

One thing I really loved about this book My hubby ended up sitting with me in our garden with a several cups of tea listening to Stranded and he even enjoyed it, whilst topping up our tans!

Big Thank you to Avon Books UK and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

Every big brother contestants worst nightmare! I really enjoyed the narration. The story moved along at a good pace, characters were well thought out and likeable/ detestable in equal measure!

EXCERPT: Frozen to the bone, I stumble from the boat and look around me at the village. It's not Creel, but some place exactly like it; houses tumbling like rocks down towards the hungry sea. Fishing boats and cracked concrete. I stand there, swaying slightly with the motion of the boat I've left behind. There's no sound or movement from the houses.

Somehow, despite coming so far, through so much, the idea of going up to one of those doors and knocking, being confronted by a stranger, has me frozen. What is waiting in those houses? Is there even anyone there?

'Are you all right, poppet?'

I turn so fast I nearly fall over. On the doorstep of a tiny cottage is an old woman in a wool skirt and fluffy slippers. Her eyes are wide and she has a wire cage of milk bottles in one hand, her back still half stooped to put it on the doorstep.

As I turn, her eyes fall to the strap of the rifle and she drops the bottles. They smash, throwing glass all over the concrete step. Fear is etched on her face as I remove the rifle and lay it on the ground.

I rise, and glance down at my ripped and muddy clothing, hanging off my skeletal body. With effort, I part my sticky, salt encrusted lips.

'I need the police.'

ABOUT 'STRANDED': Eight strangers.
One island.
A secret you'd kill to keep.

When eight people arrive on the beautiful but remote Buidseach Island, they are ready for the challenge of a lifetime: to live alone for one year.

Eighteen months later, a woman is found in an isolated fishing village. She’s desperate to explain what happened to her: how the group fractured and friends became enemies; how they did what they must to survive until the boat came to collect them; how things turned deadly when the boat didn’t come…

But first Maddy must come to terms with the devastating secret that left them stranded, and her own role in the events that saw eight arrive and only three leave.

MY THOUGHTS: In all honesty, I believe you would need to be a fan of TV 'reality' shows like Survivor to appreciate this book. In hindsight, I am probably the wrong demographic. I was thinking that this would be more of a murder mystery, and it is not.

Maddy is the narrator. She is grief stricken following the death of her parents. She lost her job as a botanist after clashing with her boss, and is temping office work. She is lost and lonely and believes she needs this challenge to find herself. So she isn't very happy when life on the Island starts to mirror the life she left behind. Tensions between the contestants escalate until . . .

Initially I found the personality clashes between the contestants interesting, and while I knew that bad stuff had to happen, I was expecting a more even division into 'sides' than occurred.

While I never quite lost interest, Stranded seemed inordinately long. It felt like we lived through every day of those eighteen months. Repeatedly. And in the end? It became tedious. And frankly, unbelievable.

⭐⭐.7

#Stranded #NetGalley

I: @sarah_goodwin_author @harpercollinsuk @avonbooksuk

T: @SGoodAuthor @HarperCollinsUK @AvonBooksUK

#contemporaryfiction #crime #mystery

THE AUTHOR: Sarah Goodwin is a novelist who grew up in rural Hertfordshire and now lives in Bristol. She was raised on C. S. Lewis, Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie by her parents and spent her summers in castles and on battlefields making up stories about women struggling for survival against war, poverty and dragons.

At Bath Spa University Sarah studied for a BA in Creative Writing and self-published seven novels across various genres, including YA magical realism, contemporary women’s fiction, romance and horror.

While undertaking her Master’s degree, Sarah participated in writing and performing in sketches for Bristol-based What Have You Comedy and now appears regularly on Bristol Youth Radio Rocks as part of a weekly mental health hour for young people.

Sarah graduated in 2014 with an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Harper Collins UK audio for providing an audio ARC of Stranded by Sarah Goodwin, and narrated by Esme Sears, for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review is also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage

I really enjoyed this book
The plot centre's around 8 people sign up for a reality show
They agree to spend a whole year on the island of Buidseach, a remote, uninhabited island, as part of a reality show the whole thing will be caught on camera
The group start to work together and build up a thriving community, they build a shelter, fish ,grow crops and forage for food
Maddie the main character isn't the type you would expect to sign up for something like this and as the story progress's you see her struggles with the group dynamics and for no real reason the others start to bully Maddie even though her survival skills would be an asset to them
The majority of others are just downright nasty and turn everyone against Maddie and things get pretty scary
As the tension builds I started willing Maddie to survive against the odds.
Will all 8 make it off the island you will have to read the book to find out

The tension and increasing menace is palpable

Thanks to publishers Harper Collins UK Audio and Net Galley for the opportunity to listen to this book
in exchange for an honest review.

This was my first audio book, I thoroughly enjoyed listen to it, made my chores and the school run so much more interesting! I did feel though the narrator could have put a bit more emotion into it.
As for the book itself I was drawn in by the description as I’m a big fun of I’m a celebrity and it seemed kind of similar, but oh my word the similarities ended there!
It soon becomes clear that the experience is not at all what the participants expected clue a breathtaking race to survival!
Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for letting me review this book!

This was a great thriller, albeit a fairly long audiobook.
The audiobook was narrated by Esme Sears, who performed a strong narration but sadlyat all, I did feel my attention wandering on several occasions. I have had a difficult week personally which has not helped my concentration levels at all, but I do love a thriller that can hold my attention no matter what, and one I can truly escape from reality into.
The characters were many, and at times a little difficult to keep track of.
It was a great premise and executed well, I would recommend it to thriller readers.

It's a good job as I was listening at home on my own, as I lost count of the number of times i shouted back at one of the characters as I was listening! A true sign of an excellent book, doubled by having an excellent narrator to capture and enhance the tone of the novel.

Loved it,

Wow what a wild ride. I was hooked at the beginning and couldn't wait to see where the story was going. You knew the outcome quite early on due to the dual timeline, but had no idea how you got there. I liked how the author developed the relationships between the characters and how they intensified as the book progressed. I must admit Maddie wasn't totally likable to me, but the story was compelling and I wanted to know what transpired on the island.

Esme Sears narrates the audiobook and does a great job at pulling the listener in. I highly recommend this for adventure- mystery lovers. It is a little cross between Survivor and Lord of the Flies

If you wantI really dark and disturbing audiobook to listen to Then this is definitely it. This dark twisted tale about a reality TV show gone totally wrong will have you on the edge of your seats and I really hope that this gets made into a TV series or movie as it would make a great thriller. The narrator has the perfect voice for the story and was able to convey the terror and disbelief that Maddie must have felt. I absolutely love this.

This Survivor/Hunger Games/Lord of the Flies mash up will keep you guessing until the end, with some clever twists along the way.

The novel depicts a reality show that the team are
terming ‘a social experiment’, where a group of 8 men and woman are to imagine that they are the lone survivors in an end of the world scenario. They are taken to a remote Scottish island, (its name translates as The Witches Island) where they are to attempt to set up life there for the next 11 months.

This is a first person narrative told in both present tense on the island and flashback interviews, meaning that you know from early on that our narrator, Maddy, survives and that something goes badly wrong.

For the most part, this works well, with the device of talking to the camera attached to each person allowing Maddy to rely on the truth of what she says being confirmed. I also enjoyed hearing about the harvesting and use of plants, although obviously, that does become repetitive. I think that it would have been interesting to understand a bit more about why Maddy’s parents were so determined to isolate her from others since that seems important to understand her better and forms an important part of her psychological makeup.

One thing that I enjoyed less was the interview sections which were an obvious device and didn’t feel realistic
and I wondered if court records would have been better.

I enjoyed listening to this as an audiobook and felt that the narrator, Esme Sears, did a good job of pacing and keeping the tension.

With thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK Audio for an audiobook arc of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

While the story didn’t 100% work for my own taste, credit where credit is due, this book isn’t like anything I’ve read before. It isn’t your usual mystery, although there is certainly that element. It’s actually, largely, a survival story. This is what didn’t work for me as I don’t usually enjoy them. Nothing wrong at all with the book, this is just a matter of taste. That said, the set up was fascinating. Such a creative premise. Like I’m a celebrity meets wilderness survival meets physiological experiment? I would have loved to read more about the ‘experiment’. Would have loved to know more about what happened after survival. What we’re the results of the experiment? Did the show go the way the producers expected? (Minus the murders ofc) That’s the angle that would have interested me more. However if you love character driven, humanity at its worst, survival type stories this is absolutely one to read.

I enjoyed it a lot on audio. It gave it an almost true crime podcast feeling, or something like an ‘I survived’ episode. Excellent performed. I loathe to give it an average review because it definitely wasn’t your average story. Enjoyable and readable, even bingeable - I did get invested in the story. And while the execution was not quite my cup of tea, I still recognise that this is a solid mystery. The questions at the centre being: what the hell happened on that island? and how did our MC survive it?

Big thank you to Avon and Harper Collins, the author and Netgalley for a ALC of this one in return for an honest, unbiased review. Stranded it out now.