Author(s): Charlotte Randall

Novel | Read our reviews! | Historical | Aotearoa Fiction

"When the Captain find us stowaways and give us the choice between join the island or join the crew, all of us to a man cry island! island! So he put us ashore with a few provisions and a trypot and sail away." After escaping from the Norfolk Island jail on a whaling ship, Bloodworth and three fellow convicts are left on a remote southern island by a captain who promises to pick them up in one year. It will be nearly a decade before they are rescued. In the intervening years, four men with nothing in common but a desire to escape Norfolk Island and a need to survive, live together in cramped and freezing isolation. But they are no longer under the cruel control of their jailers, so it is freedom, isn't it? Based on the true story of four convicts who spent more than nine years on the Snares Islands in the early years of the nineteenth century, Charlotte Randall's latest novel is a riveting, intelligent and powerful work of fiction.

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STELLA'S REVIEW: 
Randall is a very fine writer and this tale of four escaped convicts from the Norfolk Island penal colony in the early nineteenth century is excellent. The convicts escape, only to be caught as stowaways. Given a choice of join the crew (who don’t seem too well watered and fed) or the Island, they choose the latter. Dumped on Snares Island they are left with a bag of potatoes, a tri-pot and an empty promise of passage in a year if they collect enough seal skins. With little in common except a desire to survive, they are thrown together in the midst of the ocean on a small inhospitable island. Nicknamed Slangham, Toper, Gargantua and Bloodworth, they each have their own ways of coping – hard work, faith, sarcasm, and watchfulness. Based on a true story, this is an intriguing and intelligent novel. Randall successfully gets under the skin of these men to give us rich characters with surprisingly formidable abilities and crushing weaknesses. She subtly reflects, through her characters and their conversations, the concerns of men, survival and the thinking of the time.

{STELLA}