Diana Souhami is Woman-Stirred

Please join Merry Gangemi this Thursday, September 13th, at 5pm (EDT), for an interview with British author, Diana Souhami.

Souhami is the author of Coconut Chaos (London: Orion, 2007), Selkirk's Island (the 2001 U.K. Whitbread Biography Award), The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (short listed for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and the U.S. Lamda Literary Award), Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter (Lamda Literary Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Wild Girls, Gertrude and Alice, Greta and Cecil, and Gluck: Her Biography.

Coconut Chaos "connects the famous mutiny on the Bounty in the Pacific Ocean in 1789 to the plight of the islanders of Pitcairn now.

Its conceptual core is how a small chance thing, the taking of a coconut by Fletcher Christian from William Bligh's stores on the ship, had dramatic ramifications that continue today. The analogy is with chaos theory in science: how a small variation in conditions can result in dynamic transformations elsewhere. This story 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, most of them extraordinary, 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...

This is not a "one thing after another" book, it is a continuum where things interrelate, a metaphorical voyage that leads to the chaos of Pitcairn's unlawfulness today."