The sun wheeled like a great burning ball above the eastern horizon. Each person was alone with his own private hell of thrist and pain. The lifeboat remained, as she has been for days, motionless on the water. Nobody moved....

Released on Saturday, January 10, 2004 at Pickwicks in Wien, Wien Austria.

A really exciting book, which kept me reading, right up to the end! This sort of book has the potential to have a rather impossible storyline, but here the author does it really well, and gets very close to the pushing his characters over the edge into the fantastic, but never actually does (if you see what you mean!). A new author to me, but one I wouldn't mind reading more of.

This book read at first as if it was intended to be a film, or perhaps a six-part TV series, with every episode ending in a cliff-hanger (I sometimes wish authors would break their books into sensible chapters rather than always ending a chapter half-way through the action). Certainly, it was exciting, but eventually I realised why it wouldn't make such good viewing: it would be too grim, watching the poor buggers getting more and more desperate, accumulating injuries and ill health and generally being shifted from ship to ship until half of them had died.

And is anybody really that heroic for that long? I'm sure there were servicemen who performed acts equally heroic as the ones in the book, but probably not *all* of the acts, and not within a period of a few days. But then the book was written less than 20 years after the events it depicts, and the image of the plucky Brit standing up to the evil Axis powers was probably still stuck in the national psyche. All in all, it's a very readable book, provided you don't take it too seriously.

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