Species of Feeling

Captain Franklin Hatcher was a Special Forces operative in Southeast Asia in the earliest days of what would become the war in Vietnam. Leading a secret mission in the jungles of Laos, his team was caught in an ambush and all killed, with Captain Hatcher, called Hatch, left barely alive by mistake. Betrayed by his own commander, with no one to trust, Hatch vanished into the tropical forest and became a mad part of it. After finding the young woman he loved slaughtered in the village, Hatch limps out of the mountains, across the valleys, out of the jungle, out of the country, out of the war, and out of the way of the civilized world. Twenty years later, chased through the world's tropical seas by his inner demons, Hatch has come to live quietly in a shack he built with his own hands on the South Pacific island of Tuva, fishing and scrounging for a living, having found some measure of peace. He finds love again in the hopes of a young island girl who worships him as a hero for saving her life. But when a casual encounter with the crew of an American yacht reveals the secrets of his past, Hatch is about to pay the price of survival. The Last Island is a story of good and evil, innocence and corruption, within the narrative thread of a tragic, yet beautiful, love story, played out within the natural ambiguity of human feeling.

Author: Donigan Merritt
Publisher: B & B Books
Published: 03/05/2013
Pages: 254
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 7.99h x 5.24w x 0.53d
ISBN: 9780615622941

About the Author
Henry Donigan Merritt, Jr., was born in southwest Arkansas in 1945. He has worked as a journalist, scuba diver, fishing boat captain, sailing instructor, and university professor. He holds BA and MA degrees in philosophy from Simpson College and the Claremont Graduate School, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Merritt's first novel, One Easy Piece, was published by Coward-McCann in 1981. Since then, he has published nine novels, most recently The Love Story of Paul Collins, published by B&B Books in 2012. He lives in Mexico City.

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