The story of the sixteen survivors of a plane downed in the Andes in 1972. Stranded for 10 weeks, they had little option but to eat the flesh of those who didn't survive, in order to stay alive themselves.

I picked up this book from a sorry-looking "free books" box - it's badly warped but the ironic thing is that it's been heavily eaten by bookworms, and in fact there was one alive in it when I first opened it.

An interesting book, and a marked contrast to the last "disaster" book I read, Flood. Perhaps because it is a true story, the events are told in a matter-of-fact way, calmly and without being sensationalist. There is no glossig over of the conditions or their effect on the survivors. It is incredible that these young men survived as they did, even having taken the decision to eat human flesh, and the tale is inspirational in many ways, although the frailty of the human spirit under pressure also comes through.

Utterly coincidentally, today is the 33rd anniversary of the first contact between the survivors and the outside world - see this BBC article. If nobody wants this book on a ring, I'll wild-release it somewhere.