Of all places on earth, Pitcairn Island must surely have the strangest history. Everyone knows about the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 (not a bad year for uprisings) and about the settlement founded by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts on this remote Pacific island. Now Peter Corris has created a fiction based on a distant family connection between Fletcher Christian and Corris himself, through his Manx ancestry.

The cleverest part of this book may well be the introduction. Seamlessly, Corris moves between a plausible narrative about his childhood interest in the mutiny and his daughter’s current genealogical research, and a tall tale of 200-year-old manuscripts bequeathed to him by a mysterious elderly relative called Corkhill. He writes of his excitement at discovering that one of these manuscripts was Christian’s journal: ‘“Fletcher Christian”. My throat went dry. That name, those two words – both with so many resonances and echoes that had played in my imagination for so long.’ He describes his dealings with British professors, who helped him to authenticate the documents and to translate Christian’s journal, written partly in Manx; and with ‘Associate Professor Epelli Latekefu of the University of the South Pacific’, who translated the bits written in Tahitian. There’s not a trace of parody in his discussion of ‘Dr Macconochie’s’ editorial procedures: ‘He has provided headings at appropriate points which are lacking in the original and followed conventions … not observed by Christian.’