Coconut Chaos: Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea - Hardcover

Diana Souhami is the author of many widely acclaimed books, including SELKIRK'S ISLAND, which won the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award. She has also written plays for radio and television.

'Here is a cunning and beguiling little book about Pitcairn Island, past and present, which intrigues the reader from the first page to the last.' THE DAILY MAIL "Souhami's instincts are so fine... She is confident enough, too, to play with her readers' desire for narrative authenticity." -- KATHRYN HUGHES THE GUARDIAN "Pitcairn has always been a place of fabulous inventions... It is a mark of her skill in this tricky literary territory that her fabrications don't worry us." -- DEA BIRKETT SUNDAY TIMES "The exploits of Bligh and Christian are reinterpreted by each generation, and this is an elegant, playful version for our own." -- SARA WHEELER THE TIMES "Chaos is come again in this smart, witty, mutinous book." -- FRANCES WILSON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "Coconut Chaos is a delight, moreish and funny, balancing between fact and fiction, linking together past and present, action and consequence, history and imagination. In the process Souhami raises questions about the linear narratives we use to make sense of the chaos around us, and, at the same time, revels in them." OBSERVER "The history of the mutiny is related with the same intensity and thoughtfulness that characterised Selkirk's Island... ambitiously... successfully mingles straight history and personal anecdotes." DAILY TELEGRAPH "Seamlessly and elegantly, Souhami weaves together the strands of past and present, and unravels parallels between Pitcairn's extraordinary beginnings and its equally extraordinary present... full of love." -- MATTHEW DENNISON MAIL ON SUNDAY "Souhami interweaves the two narratives in a double helix, the original mutiny and her tribulations on Pitcairn today. In doing so, she conveys the true Homeric grandeur of the tale, for that original mutiny continues to generate extraordinary events." DAILY EXPRESS "Souhami is a name you can trust and here, as in her previous books, she proves herself to be a master storyteller in whose elegant hands fact and fiction interweave with admirable grace." -- MELISSA KATSOULIS NEW STATESMAN "It's subversive, philosoophical, deliberately chaotic, and a rattling good yarn." THE INDEPENDENT "It's bonkers but somehow it works. Highly recommended." DIVA "a strange and hugely entertaining hybrid of history, autobiography, travelogue, and police procedural, leavened with a little chaos theory and a certain amount of mischief-making." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS "Her accomplished narrative is rich in both descriptive writing and the interplay of ideas about history, biography and destiny." THE FIRST POST