New Street Communications

The tale that inspired The Mercy starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz …

Windcheck Magazine (Nov/Dec 2016): Absorbing and insightful … utterly unforgettable.

Practical Sailor (Jan 2017): Adds a new depth of storytelling to a tale of madness that many sailors are familiar with.

Points East Magazine (July 2017): Crowhurst made his own bed, and unfortunately he lay in it, too. He flew too close to the sun, and his story done right, as it is in Desperate Voyage, never grows old.

Steven Callahan, New York Times bestselling author of Adrift: Desperate Voyage provides readers precious insights through concentration on the backstory and how Crowhurst’s basic personality drove him inexorably towards disaster, and like a dangerous vortex, dragged his family, friends, and supporters into his sphere. … Simply fascinating.

More Praise:

Ed Renehan’s Desperate Voyage, the retelling of Donald Crowhurst’s tragic voyage during the 1968/69 Golden Globe Race, is a finely honed account of what has become offshore sailing’s most enduring story. Drawing on an array of sources, Renehan’s Crowhurst is Shakespearean: narcissistic and reviled but also sympathetic, a flawed human consumed by ambition. Although I’ve known this story forever, Renehan’s fresh, haunting narrative had me hoping for a new ending, a better outcome this time around. Alas, it’s not to be. You just keep reading until it breaks your heart.
– John Kretschmer, author of Sailing a Serious Ocean, At the Mercy of the Sea, Flirting With Mermaids,and Cape Horn to Starboard

Edward Renehan’s Desperate Voyage is incisive, haunting, and absorbing. For those, like me, initially unfamiliar with this great sea drama, it is a perfect introduction to the story of Donald Crowhurst and the Golden Globe Race of 1968. Crowhurst is flawed and complicated, a tragic and captivating figure, and Renehan’s retelling, Shakespearean in scope, is wonderfully crafted and endlessly fascinating.
– William Boyle, author of the critically-acclaimed Gravesend and Death Don’t Have No Mercy

On a dismal day at the end of October, 1968, a weekend sailor by the name of Donald Crowhurst set out from England in a flimsy trimaran, hoping to win the London Sunday Times “Golden Globe” race and become the first solo sailor to circumnavigate the world nonstop. His was an exercise in over-arching ambition, delusion, and tragedy such as the world has seldom known. Before it was over, the world media would be subject to a fraud of enormous proportions, and Crowhurst would die a madman in the middle of the Atlantic. What he left behind was a shattered boat, a shattered family, and this incredible story.

Includes exclusive photos by Eric Loss showing Teignmouth Electron as she looks today.

Further pen & ink illustrations by Tricia Highsmith

Listen to a Free Sample of the Audiobook Narrated by Dennis Kleinman

Visit the Facebook Page for The Mercy

Available in Kindle, ePub, Paper, and Audio Editions from Amazon, B&N, iTunes, Audible, Indiebound, and other sellers.

Kindle/ePub: $5.99 (USA) / Paper $9.99 (USA) / Audio Edition $6.95 (USA)

By Chris Dickon

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Throughout A Rendezvous With Death: Alan Seeger In Poetry, At War – the first modern biography of the famed and doomed “Great War” poet Alan Seeger – author Chris Dickon uses previously untapped papers and archives to reveal Seeger as a complex, enigmatic, and fatalistic genius confronting his art (and the war in which he found himself) with robust, romantic intensity.

As Seeger’s friend and Harvard classmate T. S. Eliot commented: “[Seeger’s solemnity was] thoroughgoing, not a mere literary formality. Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity; everything about him was in keeping.”

Dickon shows the expatriate American Seeger as an avid soldier for France long before the time when the United States finally entered the war. In doing so, Dickon not only delivers an eloquent narrative of Seeger’s works and days, but also expertly places him in the context of both his time and ours.

In his diary, Seeger wrote: “I never took arms out of any hatred against Germany or the Germans, but purely out of love for France.” And it is in France where – to this day – he remains most revered. Meanwhile his greatest and most prophetic poem “I Have A Rendezvous With Death” is one of the best known in the world.

From Seeger’s affluent childhood in New York and Mexico, to his college days at Harvard with friend John Reed, to Bohemian Greenwich Village and ultimately to the Left Bank of Paris and his final year in the trenches of Northern France … Dickon’s masterful book tells the tale of Seeger’s short life with great depth, clarity, and sympathy.

Paperback/302 pages/Illustrated

ISBN-13: 978-0692851135

Retail, USA: $25.00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Chris Dickon is a writer and veteran PBS television and radio producer. His previous books include The Foreign Burial of American War Dead, The Enduring Journey of the USS Chesapeake, and Americans at War in Foreign Forces.

Purchase from Amazon in the United States, UK, France, Germany. Also available elsewhere around the world from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other sellers.

The Partie a Remplir par le Corps denoting Alan Seeger’s death on July 4, 1916:

Resources:

Desperate Voyage: Donald Crowhurst, The London Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and the Tragedy of Teignmouth Electron

A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH: Alan Seeger In Poetry, At War

By Chris Dickon