A litany of historical madness and disasters from the Vikings in Greenland and America to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Aryan supremacist sister in South America and finishing with the tragedy of Jim Jones and the Peoples’ Temple. The London Sunday Times wrote: “successful colonies are the stuff of schoolroom history: everyone knows about the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock and Captain Cook at Botany Bay. In this collection of 25 tales of colonies lost, burnt, abandoned or otherwise destroyed, Ed Wright proves that the murky history of colonial disaster is just as fascinating, and just as important.”
The Brisbane Courier Mail wrote: “Ghost Colonies, written by established Pier 9 author Ed Wright, is the latest in a Lost and Found in History series to use the format, and is arguably the most interesting. From murderous Icelandic outcast Erik the Red’s Viking settlements in Greenland and his sons’ adventures in Arctic North America in 1000AD to the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, this 320-page volume tells the story of 25 would-be utopias that failed to live up to the dream. They include a few of history’s better known colonial outpost failures, including the Scottish colony at Darien, Panama (1698-1700) and the failed utopian colonies of New Australia and Cosme in Paraguay at the end of the 19th century.