I’m very excited to have been invited as a visiting writer (and reader) on a Reading Retreat to Tobago in the Caribbean in May 2027 by bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud. And this is your invitation to join us! Please direct all enquiries to Ella (ellaberthoud@gmail.com).

Here is what she is offering.

For years, I’ve been dreaming of creating a reading holiday in one of my favourite places in the world. Next May, I’ll be taking a small group to the beautiful Caribbean village of Castara in Tobago. Fancy coming along?

 It’s going to be reading paradise.

Imagine waking to the sound of the sea – swimming before breakfast – reading in a hammock – drifting between the beach and your balcony book in hand – luxuriating in the pleasure of having nowhere else to be..

The natural beauty of Tobago is spectacular; Castara Bay is a place that will live in your heart forever. The food is fantastic – their own restaurant, the Caribbean Kitchen, offers fresh fish every day caught from the bay below, local delicacies and vegetarian delights. Breakfast and dinner will be included in the package, and you can find lots of lunch options in the village of Castara, or cook in your own lodge, each of which has a small kitchen. 

We’ll explore some of the island’s hidden gems by boat – and on foot – swim in warm Caribbean waters, walk to a beautiful waterfall, and still have plenty of time to lose ourselves in a good book.

The week is curated and led by me, Ella Berthoud, pioneering bibliotherapist and co-author of the international bestseller The Novel Cure. For more than 20 years, I have been prescribing fiction for life’s ailments and leading workshops around the world—from Jaipur and Sharjah to London and Kuala Lumpur—helping people navigate life’s ups and downs with the right book in hand.

As part of the week, every guest will have a private, one-to-one bibliotherapy session with me. We’ll talk about your reading life, your personal life and the things you would like more—or less—of, before I create a thoughtfully tailored prescription of books for you to take away.

Before we arrive, we’ll all receive a novel to read, giving us a shared story to begin the week. We will meet every morning after breakfast, and in the early evening to discuss an aspect of reading – how to read deeply, how to discover what kind of a reader you are, how to get more reading into your life, how to keep a reading notebook, and we will share our own favourite reads. Of course, all of this is optional – you can choose to explore or lounge. Each guest will have a one-to-one bibliotherapy session with me, during the day, which we will work out to fit your time-table. Each evening we will gather before supper in the wonderful Caribbean Kitchen, and share ideas. Part of the joy of this Reading Paradise is the shared experience – the new friendships you will make through the power of reading and sharing this immersive week. 

We will  be joined by the fabulous Emma Bache, internationally renowned graphologist, who will offer fascinating insights about what our handwriting reveals about us, spending an evening looking at your hand-writing if you would like to join in.

And -I can now announce that our Guest Author will be Costa Novel Award Winner Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, The Memory of Animals, and now most recently, Hunger and Thirst. Claire will be joining in all our activities, and will spend an evening talking about her novels, with an informal Q and A from me. As well as being a brilliant novelist, writing across genres, Claire is also a mine of reading information, being a huge bibliophile herself.

It’s your paradise. Join every conversation—or none at all. Spend the whole week with your head in a novel if that’s your idea of bliss.

If you’re already wondering which books you’d pack, we’ll talk flights. If you’re already reaching for your passport, I’ll send you the full itinerary! 

Ella x

Here’s a few of the things we’ll enjoy together

Seven nights at beautiful Castara RetreatsA goody-bag including books by Ella Berthoud, Claire Fuller and Emma Bache

Swimming, reading and plenty of time to do absolutely nothing
A shared novel and relaxed conversations about books
A private one-to-one bibliotherapy session
A boat trip along Tobago’s spectacular Caribbean coast
A beach drumming evening with local musicians
Delicious Caribbean food
An evening with Emma Bache discussing the revelations of hand-writing 
An evening with Claire Fuller focusing on her books, and her presence Sunday to Friday

You will have a choice of sharing a twin room, having a standard solo or a premier solo. All of the rooms are beautiful, so it depends if you want to share or have more space to yourself.

Shared Twin – £1550
Standard Solo –£2025
Premier Solo –£2750

The above costs include 

-Your room for seven nights
-Breakfast every morning
-Six nights of supper in the Caribbean kitchen ( one night on the beach with drumming, street food at your own expense)
Lunch every day is at your cost
– Airport transfers in Tobago
-A beautiful boat trip to nearby beaches with lunch included
-A guided trip to the nearby waterfall
-Group trip to Charlottesville

Dates 7th to 14th May 2027

Flights are on top of the cost of the rooms, and you book these yourselves. From UK, I reccommend flying with BA which does direct flights to Tobago. You can book yourself or book through Trailfinders where I have a contact who will help you for no extra cost. 

Please book your own travel insurance 

PAYMENT SCHEDULE

A non-refundable deposit of £300 is required to secure your place. This deposit forms part of the total holiday price.

The remaining balance will be payable in two equal instalments:

• First instalment: 7 January 2027
• Final instalment: 1 March 2027

Shared Twin Room – £1,550 per person
£300 deposit, followed by two instalments of £625.

Standard Solo Room – £2,025 per person
£300 deposit, followed by two instalments of £862.50.

Premier Solo Room – £2,750 per person
£300 deposit, followed by two instalments of £1,225.

About Ella 

Ella Berthoud is an author, artist and pioneering bibliotherapist, and the co-author of the internationally bestselling books The Novel Cure and The Story Cure. For more than twenty years, she has been prescribing fiction to help people navigate life’s challenges, understand themselves more deeply and discover the books that speak most powerfully to their individual lives. Alongside her one-to-one bibliotherapy practice, Ella has led talks and workshops around the world—from London, Paris and Helsinki to Jaipur, Sharjah and Kuala Lumpur—and is the co-host of the podcast Fiction Prescriptions. She is also a practising artist whose work explores the relationship between landscape, sound and memory. Having lived in Trinidad for seven years, Ella retains a deep love for the island, making this reading holiday the perfect meeting of two of her greatest passions: transformative books and the extraordinary beauty and spirit of Tobago. Find out more about Ella and bibliotherapy at www.ellaberthoud.com.

About Claire Fuller 

Claire Fuller is an acclaimed novelist and short-story writer whose six novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her debut, Our Endless Numbered Days, won the Desmond Elliott Prize, while Unsettled Ground won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; her other much-loved books include Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, The Memory of Animals and her latest novel, Hunger and Thirst. Claire came to fiction at the age of forty, having first studied sculpture and spent many years working in marketing—an inspiring and unconventional route into an award-winning literary career. Her beautifully atmospheric novels explore family secrets, isolation, memory, landscape and the complicated ways in which people love and survive. She is also an experienced and generous teacher of creative writing, with a gift for illuminating how stories are imagined, shaped and brought to life.

About Emma Bache

Emma Bache is one of the UK’s leading graphologists, with an increasingly prominent international profile. Since 1989, she has revealed the personalities behind the handwriting for clients ranging from Google, Salesforce and Montblanc to royalty and celebrities, while her forensic work has helped lawyers, insurers and security specialists investigate fraud, blackmail and criminal behaviour. A former columnist for The Times and the Financial Times, Emma is a familiar face and voice across television and radio, including BBC Fake or Fortune, Sky News, BBC Breakfast, This Morning and Amazon Prime’s Becoming Ian Brady. Her expert authentication of President Donald Trump’s signature for Sky News went viral worldwide, attracting more than six million TikTok views in just 24 hours. She has also contributed to groundbreaking research into handwriting changes associated with Parkinson’s disease and sleep disorders. The author of Reading Between the Lines, Emma was invited to speak as a leader in her field at the 2026 World Governments Summit in Dubai, cementing her reputation as a captivating international speaker and global authority on what our handwriting reveals about us.

Please direct all enquiries to Ella: ellaberthoud@gmail.com

I love novels featuring lonely women, and here are eight of my favourite. Whether the women are happy or sad in their loneliness, looking for company, or just plain weird, I love them all.

Let me know which you’ve read and also loved, and which you’ve never heard of. If you’re interested in buying any from Bookshop.org (UK) then have a browse.

Here’s a little information on why I love these eight books:

Look at Me by Anita Brookner: I have to admit I read this because a couple of reviews of my third novel, Bitter Orange, said this followed a similar story, and I was intrigued. It is about a lonely woman called Frances (!) who becomes entranced by a glamorous couple who play with her for a while before discarding her. Introspective and contemplatory.

Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell: Over the course of 117 chapters (some as short as a paragraph), we follow Mrs Bridge as she goes about her day-to-day life as a housewife and mother in 1930s Kansas City. She’s been brought up in a certain way, and wants to bring her children up in that way too. She can be bigoted and racist, but she knows this isn’t right, and yet she can’t seem to work out how to break out of her narrow boring existence of the country-club circle. The ending is superb.

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers: A real comfort read: a mystery, a love affair, and a bit of nicely understated tragedy. Jean, a journalist, lives with her mother in the suburbs of London, when a woman writes in to Jean’s paper that she has had a child by parthenogenesis, Jean sets out to investigate.

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban: Neaera and William are two lonely people who have never met. They both happen to go to the zoo one day and both – separately – decide that it’s not right that the three fully-grown turtles should be kept in a small tank.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzberg: The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability.

The Gloaming by Melanie Finn: My perfect kind of novel. Beautiful writing, with every sentence crafted and considered, but with a gripping story and characters. In Switzerland, Pilgrim’s husband leaves her for another woman and shortly afterwards she has a terrible car accident, the consequences of which reach far across the world. She turns up in Tanzania, traumatised and guilty, waiting and watching for when her shame will catch up with her.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi: Gifty is a lonely student studying reward-seeking behavior in mice at Stanford. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

The Woman Upstairs: I loved this book and I loved Nora. She’s angry inside, sometimes naive, self-absorbed, but so human. Nora is a 39 year old school teacher in Cambridge, Ma. Single and frustrated with how she hasn’t fulfilled her ambition to be an artist, she meets the Shahid family who are in Cambridge for a year, and falls in love with each of them in turn. But maybe they only appear to love her back.

The audio of my sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst is on special offer from Xigxag in the UK. You can listen to it for just £3.99 without needing a subscription. Offer ends at the end of August 2026.