Don't Stop the Carnival

It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. (Hilarity and disaster -- of a sort peculiar to the tropics -- ensue.) It's the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving. Norman Paperman suddenly finds his glittering Manhattan life and his job as a Broadway publicity agent boring and unbearable. He chucks it all to buy a hotel on the island of Amerigo, in the Caribbean Sea. His efforts to cope with the bizarre characters and strange ways of the tropic island lead to explosive comic situations, and his desperate attempt to recapture his youth, in a sunset love affair with a film actress he once idolized.