"When the Captain find us stowaways and give us the choice between join the island or join the crew, all of us to a man cry island! island! So he put us ashore with a few provisions and a trypot and sail away." After escaping from the Norfolk Island jail on a whaling ship, Bloodworth and three fellow convicts are left on a remote southern island by a captain who promises to pick them up in one year. It will be nearly a decade before they are rescued. In the intervening years, four men with nothing in common but a desire to escape Norfolk Island and a need to survive, live together in cramped and freezing isolation. But they are no longer under the cruel control of their jailers, so it is freedom, isn't it? Based on the true story of four convicts who spent more than nine years on the Snares Islands in the early years of the nineteenth century, Charlotte Randall's latest novel is a riveting, intelligent and powerful work of fiction.