Now filmed as The Mercy starring Colin Firth & 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. Praise from 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.
Further illustrations by Tricia Highsmith.
