Expedite your nonfiction book discovery process with Readara interviews, summaries and recommendations, Broaden your knowledge and gain insights from leading experts and scholars
In-depth, hour-long interviews with notable nonfiction authors, Gain new perspectives and ideas from the writer’s expertise and research, Valuable resource for readers and researchers
Optimize your book discovery process, Four-to eight-page summaries prepared by subject matter experts, Quickly review the book’s central messages and range of content
Books are handpicked covering a wide range of important categories and topics, Selected authors are subject experts, field professionals, or distinguished academics
Our editorial team includes books offering insights, unique views and researched-narratives in categories, Trade shows and book fairs, Book signings and in person author talks,Webinars and online events
Connect with editors and designers,Discover PR & marketing services providers, Source printers and related service providers
It is 1864, and Captain Thomas Musgrave's schooner, the Grafton, has just wrecked on Auckland Island, a forbidding piece of land 285 miles south of New Zealand. Battered by year-round freezing rain and constant winds, it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.
Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island, another ship runs aground during a storm. Separated by only twenty miles and the island's treacherous, impassable cliffs, the crews of the Grafton and the Invercauld face the same fate. And yet where the Invercauld's crew turns inward on itself, fighting, starving, and even turning to cannibalism, Musgrave's crew bands together to build a cabin and a forge--and eventually, to find a way to escape.
Using the survivors' journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings to life this extraordinary untold story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos.
Joan Druett is a New Zealand historian and novelist, specialising in maritime history. She was born in Nelson, and raised in Palmerston North, moving to New Zealand's capital city, Wellington, when she was 16. She gained her Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the Victoria University of Wellington, and then worked as a teacher of biology and English literature for many years before publishing her first full-length book when she was 40. She travelled extensively in her 20s - including to Canada, where she lived for a while, Britain and the Middle East.
She went to America as a Fulbright Scholar in 1986, and returned there in 1992 as historian/writer for a museum exhibit, "The Sailing Circle: Seafaring Women of New York," living in Orient, Long Island, where she and her husband, Ron, a maritime artist, were artists in residence at the William Steeple Davis Trust house and studio. While Ron painted and exhibited at galleries such as Mystic Seaport Gallery, she researched and wrote historical novels and books on maritime history. Late 1996 she and Ron returned to New Zealand, and set up house in Wellington in 1997. In 2001 she was the John David Stout Fellow at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University, and is still an associate.
Source: Historic Naval Fiction
No Videos
No Community reviews