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 best-selling 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.