The Island of Desire

Robert Dean Frisbie left America for the South Pacific in 1920 and four years later set up a trading station on Danger Island, now called Pukapuka, a lonely paradise four hundred miles northeast of Samoa. This autobiographical story relates how the author fell in love with and married a charming Polynesian woman, whose name translates as Desire, and became part of the life of the island. The next six years were wonderfully happy ones. Desire gave birth first to Johnny (a girl), then Jakey, Elaine, and Nga. The charm of their lives, beyond "the faintest echo from the noisy clamour of the civilised world", is spread before the reader with the miraculous colour and texture of a Gauguin painting.