The Stowaway
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
With the suspense of a thriller and the moral resonance of a Joseph Conrad classic, The Stowaway is an adventure story of the highest caliber, a profound tale of good and evil all the more moving because it is based on actual events.
When two Romanian stowaways show themselves on the container ship Maersk Dubai one day into its passage across the Atlantic Ocean, bosun Rodolfo Miguel escorts them to his captain, assuming they’ll be fed and put to work. To his horror, and that of the rest of the crew, the officers order the men to be put onto a flimsy raft, which in an instant is sucked under the frigid, unforgiving water. Over the next few weeks, the crew is divided between those loyal to the officers and those who cannot accept what they have seen. When on a later voyage a third stowaway is found, and then another, they’re forced to come to terms with the earlier murders and, at the risk of their own lives, act for good or evil. Intercut with these events is the backstory of the desperate stowaways, forced to flee their impoverished country in search of a better life. The powerful resolution of these two narratives, of the stowaways and the crew, makes for a tense and heart-pounding tale of murder, fear, and courage on the high seas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1996, nine Filipino crewmen of the Maersk Dubai jumped ship in Halifax, reporting that the ship's Taiwanese officers had murdered three Romanian stowaways. Hough (The Final Confession of Mabel Stark) draws on contemporaneous news reports, court proceedings, interviews with some of the crewmen and his own empathy and exceptional narrative intuition to tell this story of cruelty and courage, crafting not only a maritime adventure but also a resonant, timely morality tale. In the haunting opening chapter, pious Filipino bosun Rodolfo Miguel watches as two stowaways whom he sought to help are set adrift in the cold Atlantic at the orders of the container ship's Taiwanese officers. Hough juxtaposes the efforts of Rodolfo and the rest of the primarily Filipino crew to do the right thing in the tragedy's aftermath with the odyssey of Daniel, a down-and-out Romanian youth desperate to make it to America. Though Daniel and his friend Gheorghe have no connection to the deceased pair, their parallel circumstances make it easy to see where their story is going, as, in a spiral of setbacks, the two move inexorably closer to the Maersk Dubai. Though the valiant Filipinos will risk everything to protect these new stowaways, their fate is far from assured. This is a moving, haunting novel, full of deeply sympathetic portraits of common people being uncommonly brave.
