I’m living at present on the island of Espiritu Santo in the South Pacific, a place with no television, no radio (apart from one local AM community station and Radio China) and no newspapers (apart from the one which sports front page headlines like ‘Santa Claus not in Bible, claims pastor’ and ‘Prime Minister injured by fireworks’). So my focus on the printed word has taken on a freshly appreciative and undistracted concentration. With no other media tugging at my attention, I’m oscillating between the immediate sensory world of my island environment and the conjured sensory worlds of the authors I’m immersed in. It’s all story, and book leads to book the way friends lead to other friends. Even the verb for having a chat here in Vanuatu is ‘storian’. ‘Come and story with me’ is the literal translation for a Bislama invitation to sit down and shoot the breeze. So, just for a thousand words, let’s story.

I should also say it’s extremely hot here, something a good friend no doubt had in mind when she sent me Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, a book set in remote, snowy, wind-chilled Alaska. As it happened the book arrived when I had a couple of Alaskans staying at my place, all of us hunkered down as tropical cyclone Lusi howled overhead, and their enthusiasm for Alaskan literature led me to a swag of other books featuring people toughing it out in that vast, icy landscape. Among them was Pilgrim’s Wilderness by Tom Kizzia, a fascinating account of a charismatic born-again homesteader with a huge family who, in 2002, set out determined to live as self-sufficient religious pioneers in the remote town of McCarthy in the Alaskan wilderness. The book’s subtitle, ‘A true story of faith and madness on the Alaskan frontier’ gives a glimpse of the dark, creepy side of the experiment’s fallout, as the self-styled biblical prophet who called himself ‘Papa Pilgrim’ and his long-suffering wife and fourteen children start running afoul of authorities, curious locals and finally, inevitably, the law—which suits Papa Pilgrim’s persecution complex perfectly. A fascinating book.