The Bright Side of My Condition by Charlotte Randall
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.  {Reviewed by STELLA}

>> The Bright Side of My Condition is one of the books featured in the
New Zealand Book Council's Aotearoa Summer Reads promotion.