The Coral Island are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and "The Coral Island" is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that in comparison to "Robinson Crusoe" such books generally replaced some of the original's romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as "The Coral Island" and Frederick Marryat's 1841 novel "Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific".
Home Game (novel) Home Game (novel) Home Game is a novel by Paul Quarrington, published in 1983 by Doubleday Canada. The novel's central character is Nathaniel Isbister, a former professional baseball player turned drifter. Coming across a town dominated primarily by a religious cult called the House of Jonah, he is ultimately called upon to lead the town's only other residents, a ragtag band of circus freaks, in a high-stakes baseball game to determine which of the two groups will be forced to pack up and leave town. The novel was a shortlisted finalist for the Stephen Leacock Award in 1984. Following Quarrington's