Spooky Sue

You're forty years old, and war is just breaking out in Europe. Do you want to spend the hostilities as stores and acquisitions manager in your father-in-law's factory in the Midlands? It's simply not an option for our hero, and he signs on the Sue N Dewey, bound for Canada, in the hope of joining the services there. But then, 1,500 miles into the Atlantic, disaster strikes... And now I began to really panic. I had been marooned on a doomed ship. The next big wave would shove the Sue N beyond her centre of gravity and she would turn over and sink like a stone. How he kept alive, got the stricken ship in trim, repelled armed boarders and saw off the covert attentions of a German destroyer - not to mention an armed insurrection from his final rescuers - form the core of this magnificent saga of survival. With its overtones of Nevil Shute, Nicholas Monsarrat and Daniel Defoe, Spooky Sue takes the reader from exultation to despair, from grim determination to seemingly boundless hope, as the Sue N bewitches all those around her and becomes a crazed symbol of a nation at war, alone in a hostile ocean. And what is her ultimate fate? Read on...