In Tasmania is that rare book – a doggedly researched work of non-fiction that reads like a page-turner. For several years after moving to eastern Tasmania from England, author Nicholas Shakespeare pursued all sorts of leads, delving into his past before even understanding his intricate connections to Tasmania and its people. He uncovers a new world of characters, from early settlers like Anthony Fenn Kemp, to current residents like Nevin Shakespeare (“not a family tree man”), and the charming sisters, Ivy and Maud, who feed historic detail to Shakespeare in painfully small doses.

The result is a lively history of the island from pre-British years to the establishment of settlements, colonization, ‘transportation’ of convicts, and right up to the present discussions of heritage, politics, and endangered species. The Tassie spirit – and Shakespeare’s genealogy – emerges as a hodgepodge of images and odors, drunks and politicians, disinterested old farmers, and busy old ladies.

There is no need to have traveled to Tasmania to enjoy the book. But an interest in history and the tangled past of our ancestors is key. The story passes easily between the denials and clues that we all use to piece our family history together. Shakespeare draws Dickensian portraits of his forebears, avoids judgment, and involves us in the chase for more connecting threads. The convict heritage of Tasmania is no more or less important than any other era, blended in with Shakespeare’s interesting pastiche of newspaper accounts of rascally settlers and businessmen, current debates on aboriginal genealogy and current self-identification, and plenty of personal interviews.

Along the way, Shakespeare includes some entertaining references to the rich (and poor) and famous who have been influenced by Tasmania, including Errol Flynn, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Rudyard Kipling, and Somerset Maugham, as well as William Bligh and Charles Darwin.

Shakespeare is hard pressed to give up his questioning. But he does ease up eventually when he realizes that the connections go on and on. Everyone in Tasmania is somehow related, if only by the fact of having lived there. There’s pride in that, whether the impetus for residency was a court sentence, fleeing debt, seeking solace, finding family, escaping family, or merely a happy accident of birth.