This is a really enjoyable, satisfying story. Mau, Irmintrude (who chooses to tell him her name is Daphne, instead, because who wants to be called Irmintrude?), and the other survivors who trickle in to join them learn to communicate, learn to understand each other, and build a functioning new community. A fast ship is on its way from home to Port Mercier to bring him back. What she doesn't know is that influenza has hit at home, and everyone between her father and the throne has died. She's the daughter of a man who is 139th in line for the throne, on the way to join her father, governor of the colony at Port Mercier. The first of his fellow survivors, though, before anyone else joins them, is the lone survivor of a ship from a place that isn't quite our England. Mau's island isn't the only one affected, but it is one of the largest locally, and the place that other survivors gradually gather in the aftermath. In a world that isn't quite our own, in a place that isn't the South Pacific, a boy on the brink of manhood is on his way home from his ritual one-month exile, in the canoe he has made himself, when a volcano erupts and a tsunami is unleashed that, he discovers when he reaches his home island, wipes out his entire tribe. It is a good read, chapters are relatively short, the action picks up pace along the pages and the characters could be the metaphor for a new Eden/world, like Adam and Eve, despite other additional people on the island. It doesn.t leave anyone indifferent and our interpretation of the whole can also differ from each other.

There is much less humour than in the Discworld novels, it is very different in tone and writing style, with quite possibly some underlying ecological and sociological message behind it all for readers. In this, it can be considered a double 'picaresque' novel, as if Pratchett had recreated a new world from an small island, with not so much a Big Bang, but as the result of a tsunami/earthquake. My initial impression was that the two characters's experiences on the island were not connected, but the whole novel was about the two characters 'growing up' experience, what they learnt from each other and about others too. It's been a long time since I've read this novel, but I remember quite a few things from it.

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