Two very different books, both stemming, in their own way from the same event, reach the shelves in May. Mutiny on the Bounty: A Novel (Transworld) is named after that event. Written by the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne, it tells the story of the Bounty’s voyage through the viewpoint of 14-year-old John Jacob Turnstile and purports to present ‘a very different portrait of Captain Blight and Mr Christian than has ever been shown before.’ It was that Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian whose descendents are the subject of Kathy Marks’ nonfiction title Pitcairn: Paradise Lost (Flamingo, May). The small island of Pitcairn, which is home to less than 50 people, gained worldwide notoriety in 2000, when UK police began investigating a rape trial. The police uncovered widespread child abuse, which prompted a series of trials of local men. Marks, Asia-Pacific  correspondent for UK newspaper the Independent, lived on Pitcairn for six weeks during the trials and followed the story through to its conclusion last year. This is her portrait of the island and exploration of the trials: ‘Outside court she had daily encounters—not all of them civil—with the men and their families, and was able to observe at first hand how the tiny, claustrophobic community ticked.’

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker