The Pacific Room
Michael Fitzgerald
Transit Lounge Publishing
Michael Fitzgerald’s first novel ‘The Pacific Room’ introduces ‘Lewis Wakefield’, an art historian with bipolar who travels to the South Pacific to research the story behind the portrait of Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), painted in 1892 by artist Girolamo Nerli (1860-1926) on the island of Samoa, the final resting place of Tusitala ‘the teller of tales’ best known for his narrative of the ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde’ (1886). Discovering Nerli’s resolve to capture the mergence of this dual personality in the nature of the famous Scottish author, Lewis is carried on a personal exploration of his own dichotomies. Tales of secret love and yearning are woven with truths of the past and present in this work of fiction.
