'Michael Fitzgerald’s debut, The Pacific Room, is putatively a novel about the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson. After several years travelling around the Pacific, the Scottish author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde spent the last four years of his life in Samoa, on a 160-hectare estate. He became known to the locals as Tusitala (“the teller of tales”), became embroiled in local politics, and was buried there, on top of a mountain.'