This hilarious and entertaining novel by Whitbread Prize-winning writer Diana Souhami, mixes history and biography with superb skill. Now in paperback.

NRB

Souhami's latest paperback moves from a simple, random event to its complex connections. The vivid narrative includes mutiny, travel, biography, incest, homosexuality, murder and rape, science and technology, fantasy and selective history. Sea voyages drive the narrative forward, the author's own journey to Pitcairn where Fletcher Christian hid to escape punishment; Bligh's navigation to Timor in violent weather, without maps, in a small boat, with scant supplies and starving men; the voyage to England with mutineers in chains and their shipwreck... and all of it with large doses of humour.

"Souhami's instincts are so fine... She is confident enough, too, to play with her readers' desire for narrative authenticity." KATHRYN HUGHES, THE GUARDIAN

**please note that all SALE items are non-returnable and non-refundable**
"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, muntinous 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