For the German edition of my book The Dream of an Island, with the descriptive title Vom Schweden, der ein Schiff bestieg und auf den Inseln sein Glück fand I have ritten a new ending, a new epilogue, called Homecoming. The feeling of returning home to the … home island.

On a cold April evening, I’m back in the island world I know best, Stockholm’s archipelago with its twenty-four thousand islets, coves and skerries. I step aboard the ferry that glides out between the close-lying islands in the quiet inland sea. Soon I will be back on the forested archipelago island with the silvery lakes and the little cottage where at dusk I will sit and look out over the bay with the Estonian ferry. The island which is only an hour and a half journey by bus and boat from my permanent home in the central parts of the Swedish capital. The island that gives me the feeling that I have left the ordinary world and entered another.

I have a dense archipelago to wade through before I arrive. The muffled sound of the boat engine. The fizzing and splashing sound of the foaming wake. The red navigation marks with the seabirds that suddenly take off and flap away as the ferry approaches. The swans that lie still and contentedly bob in the waves. The ducks that fly urgently close to the shiny surface of the water. The islands with their gray-red-streaked granite rocks and gnarled, short-growing pines. The border of chalky white diatoms algae in the shoreline which soon, when summer is here, is replaced by green algae. The fermented, warped wooden piers that have survived another winter. The hauled-up leisure boats which, now in the spring, are wrapped in blue plastic tarpaulins. The flagpoles with their fluttering blue-yellow pennants. And the red cottages with their brick roofs and the yellow mansions with their weathered copper roofs.

Far from all the islands we pass are inhabited: after only a couple of minutes of travel, I calculate that we passed about ten islands that are too insignificant to have anything to offer a person. Instead, they belong to the terns, gulls, and cormorants. The many thousands of small islets are their kingdom. I check the chart on board: I see a sea dotted with more small islands than I could count before we arrive. It looks as if a giant took a handful of pebbles and threw them into the sea.

The ferry glides past close to islands, soft and low, painstakingly and persistently pressed down by the glacier that covered the archipelago for a hundred thousand years and then was ground by wind and waves for another ten thousand. Close to other islands, which, on the contrary, are angular and sharp, with high vertical rock walls, as if the same giant that threw pebbles carved the coastline with chisel and sledgehammer to create tension and drama.

– Soon we dock at Ängsö, says the loudspeaker voice.

A few minutes later it’s time for Gränö, then Kalvholmen and then Mörtö and Uvö, all populated. In the few minutes we are at the quay, I catch sight of a handful of cottages, most simple and inconspicuous, a few piers with boathouses, but no cafés, shops or other public establishments. At each pier, a couple of passengers disembark with shopping strolleys fully loaded with food. These islands, I think, do not belong to the temporary visitors, but to the cottage-owning summer guests.

Inspired by my journeys to islands around the world, I make a detour through an unfamiliar part of the archipelago. We stop and drop people off at Ängsholmen, Ekholmen, Orrön … Even though the islands have a regular ferry connection and are only an hour’s journey from the city where I lived most of my life, I have never heard of them.

Due to my circuitous movement, it takes a while before we arrive. I pick up the book I borrowed from the library. I only have a few pages left in Aldous Huxley’s Island, which was published in 1962, the year I was born. It is perhaps the very last truly visionary utopian island novel in the literary tradition that began with Plato’s fantasies about Atlantis. The book is about an island free from overconsumption, human conflicts and sexual neuroses. I have reached the final chapter of the book where I, as a reader, understand how fragile the idyll of the fictional island – and also many real islands ­– is. In the final scenes, the greedy mainland world seizes power to extract the island’s hidden oil deposits and create a market for mass consumption. The dream falls apart. The utopia turns into a dystopia. Snip, snap, snout, this island tale’s told out. Or: is it really?

I put the book down and think that I will soon arrive at my own dream island which, like the others around it, seems so unaffected by man’s progress. But that’s not true. Once upon a time, they too were exploited. Ever since the fifth century AC until the middle of the twentieth century, people have been digging, drilling and hacking on the islands in the Stockholm archipelago, including on my island, to get access to iron, minerals and rocks. But in the middle of the last century, the quarries fell silent, mining ceased. Instead, the islands were populated by day-trippers, summer guests and remotely working city dweller. The magical attraction of the islands, I think as I put the book away, is no longer about material values, but about intangibles: about the longing in an uncertain world for places that, in addition to being beautiful to look at and relaxing to be in, also feel manageable, comprehensible and secure.

So many and so different. On the islands I have just visited in the Gulf of Bothnia, the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, different kinds of trees and bushes grow, the islanders pray to different gods, speak different languages, and eat different kinds of food. If I’ve learned anything from all these sea voyages, it’s that all the world’s islands have something in common.

As the ferry passes an island with a single tree and a single house, which would serve as a promotional image for a retreat for mainlanders with burnout symptoms, I think of what Mickey on Denis Island said that on an island you realize how intricately connected everyone is elements in nature are and then realize that man has to take a step back and learn to play the supporting role in the great intricate ecosystem. Exactly, now I remember one more thing: afterwards he looked embarrassed, as if he had stated something obvious, banal and too politically correct. Therefore, he added, although the insight is universal, it becomes more visible to those who live on a small island far out in the sea.

The feeling that we all share the same destiny became clear when I visited a UN conference on sustainable tourism on a Spanish Mediterranean island. In an emotional speech, Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque told how he and his colleagues sat in the International Space Station and looked down on Earth. The first few days everyone tried to identify their home village or hometown. Then they gave up. For the following weeks, they contented themselves with searching for their homeland. After a few months, they gave up on that too and looked at the whole Earth, their common home island in the universe, with the feeling that they all came from the same place. Seen from the outside, it appeared clearly and distinctly as their common and indivisible home. The differences seemed insignificant.

Via Nämdö, Idöborg and Aspö and many more small islands whose names I have now forgotten, I finally arrive at my island. I walk the familiar winding dirt road between the paddocks and meadows up to the cottage. Then I think of the feeling that struck Vangelis when he returned to Amorgos, the island where he once grew up. The feeling that made him think of Homer’s Odyssey. Stronger than before, I am now filled with the feeling that I share his existential need for a return. For Odysseus it was about Ithaka, for Mickey about Denis Island, for Vangelis about Amorgos, for me about Runmarö.

So I settle down in the cabin on the island that more than any other feels like mine. Sits in the kitchen, takes a sip of coffee, and looks out over the sea.