Title: Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics
Author: Alexander Frater
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2007
400 pages
Could be used for Vanuatu in a read-the-world challenge, which is useful because it's both more available and easier to engage with than Grace Mera Molisa's Black Stone, the only other ni-Vanuatu book I've found.
Pretty much what it says--tales from the tropics, not so much a memoir as little memoirs, or pensees, or recollections. The book is framed by stories of bells associated with his grandfather's church. More stories than not take place in or around Vanuatu; others range farther afield. Some of Frater's travels were for work, some for pleasure, and some the circumstances of his birth and family life. Some chapters cohere more effectively than others; some seem very loosely constructed. It's sometimes languid, sometimes torpid. Read a chapter at a time, in a hammock.
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