Voyage to Somewhere

From the bestselling author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a World War II novel that is as thrilling as it is true to life Hoping to draw a nice, lengthy shore duty after two years at sea, Lieutenant Barton is instead told that he is being sent right back out, this time as captain of a supply ship sailing from California to New Guinea and stopping at every small island in between. Homesick for his wife, he has no choice but to accept the assignment and a crew of twenty-six landlubbers whose last names all begin with W. Their first load of cargo? Pineapples destined for Hawaii. Life aboard the one-hundred-eighty-foot SV-126 is never dull. When Barton isn't battling gale-force winds and monstrous waves, he is coping with seasick sailors and budding rivalries that threaten to turn mutinous. Hanging over the ship like a storm cloud is the knowledge that the world is at war and the enemy is never far away. Whether Lieutenant Barton and his crew are fighting torpedoes and typhoons or writing letters to loved ones, Voyage to Somewhere offers a unique and page-turning perspective on what the Second World War was really like.

About the Author :
Sloan Wilson (1920-2003) was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard University. An avid sailor, he joined the US Coast Guard shortly after Pearl Harbor and, during World War II, commanded a naval trawler on the Greenland Patrol and an army supply ship in the South Pacific. Wilson earned a battle star for his role in an attack by Japanese aircraft and based his first novel, Voyage to Somewhere, and two of his later books, Ice Brothers and Pacific Interlude, on his wartime experiences. In 1955 he published The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a classic portrait of suburban ennui heralded by the Atlantic as "one of the great artifacts of popular culture in the 50's." It was adapted into a successful film, as was its bestselling follow-up, A Summer Place. The author of fifteen books, Wilson was living with his wife of forty years, Betty, on a boat in Colonial Beach, Virginia, at the time of his death.

Review :
"One of the few honest and straightforward sea books that have come out of the war." --New York Herald Tribune "Nothing is glossed over; this is actually the way things went on board a small craft in the Pacific area, these are the mistakes men made and learned by, these are the things they thought and did." --Weekly Book Review "An eminently readable story of the sideshows of the war in the Pacific, a real saga of the small craft." --The Philadelphia Inquirer