Description

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The "compulsively and clock-racingly readable" novel (New York Times Book Review) that captures the comedy and tragedy of island life and inspired a Jimmy Buffett musical.
It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise.

It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. (Hilarity and disaster -- of a sort peculiar to the tropics -- ensue.)

It's the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving.

Praise For…

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"Finely evocative of its sun, sea, and sand...with a comic line that moves as fast as a Marx Brothers movie."—New York Times Book Review

"Wouk's coral cuts, his sandy beaches are alive with stinging sand flies...His only pirate is a boozy, busted corporate raider named Lester...His hero is a middle-aged New York Jew with a heart condition. The result is not romance but farce laced with tears."—Time

"If there are hit musicals in fiction, this is one."—Newsweek