Herman Wouk · 1965 · exile

Herman Wouk lived on St Thomas for seven years and wrote this out of it - a New York press agent who buys a Caribbean hotel to escape his life and discovers that running one is a different profession entirely. Wouk called it a comedy; it is closer to a warning, and Jimmy Buffett later made it a musical.

1. 1
   New York

   Norman Paperman is a Broadway press agent of forty-nine who has had a heart attack and decided that the answer is to buy a hotel in the Caribbean - which his wife and everyone else can see is not an answer to anything.

2. 2
   Amerigo

   Wouk's island, drawn from the St Thomas he was living on - and the Gull Reef Club, where the water pump fails, the plumbing fails, the staff vanish at carnival and a corpse turns up in a cistern in the first fortnight.

3. 3
   New York

   He sells up and goes home, older and poorer - and Wouk's point, which he made about his own years there, is that the paradise is real and so is the fact that you cannot buy your way into somebody else's life.