Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk is a 395-page cloth-bound hardcover published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965, stated first edition, Book Club Edition. The dust jacket has shelf wear and chips along the top spine and edges.  The book is clean.

Book Summary

Herman Wouk's new novel, perhaps the most entertaining he has written, is an ironic comedy of tropical adventures, misadventures, and love affairs.

A middle-aged New Yorker named Norman Paperman, a successful and well-known Broadway publicity agent, suddenly finds his glittering Manhattan life empty, boring, unbearable.  He chucks it all to buy a hotel on the island of Amerigo, in the Caribbean Sea.  To anybody who has ever dreamed of such an escape to an island paradise--and who has not?--this book will come as a revelation, as well as a hilarious and beguiling tale; for it is written by a master novelist who lives in the West Indies, and it is utterly authentic.

Paperman's effort to cope with the bizarre characters and strange ways of the tropic island leads to explosive comic situations.  His desperate attempt to recapture his youth, in a sunset love affair with a film actress whom he once idolized, starts as a poignant, bitter-sweet idyll, and ends in heartbreak.

The book has a cast of characters worthy to stand with Captain Queeg and so many other memorable portraits in the long Wouk gallery.  Iris Tramm, the beautiful and enigmatic retired actress; Lester Atlas, the bourbon-guzzling millionaire; Henny, Norman's shrewd understanding wife; Hazel, his radioactively sexy daughter; Hippolyte, the half-mad French genius of a handy man; Church Wagner, the young bartender with the looks of Billy Budd and the character of a billy goat; above all, Norman himself, struggling manfully against the island absurdities and calamities that threaten to engulf him.