Goodreads asked Michael Raleigh:

If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?

Michael Raleigh I think anyone who studied Medieval English lit, as I did, probably has a deep wish to be transported back to the half-imaginary Englande of Malory and other writers -- dense forests, dragons, knights, and it was always high summer.

But from the age of 18 I've been fascinated by the possibility of life at the world's edge, on a Pacific island (I once contemplated going to Polynesia after college to teach English). And the book that did more than any other to fix the image of life on a small island firmly in my consciousness was PITCAIRN ISLAND by Nordhoff and Hall, the third book in the BOUNTY TRILOGY.

Pitcairn is the place where the mutineers went after setting Capt. Bligh adrift in an open boat. It was small, remote, and apparently perfect. A little uninhabited paradise. Unfortunately, the mutineers brought their own trouble to this little Eden -- violence and jealousy and, most foolish of all, native women but not enough to go around so that there were always going to be men without partners. Violence erupted almost immediately.

But I still think about their little island and what life might have been like there. One mutineer did survive all the trouble and continued to live there for many years after the others died, surrounded by the women, his children and his grandchildren.

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