Just one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands. This book is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould's efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But he goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, linguistic, and ecological digressions about the marshall islands.

In this highly original work of history and adventure, novelist Robert Barclay weaves together characters and stories from mythological times with those of the present-day to give readers a rare and unsparing look at life in the contemporary Pacific.