The story of a visionary but now forgotten English naval officer and the events without which the name Charles Darwin would be unknown to us today.Captain Robert FitzRoy's first voyage aboard the HMS Beagle had concluded with the kidnapping of four "savages" from Tierra del Fuego. But when his plan to bring them back to England to civilize them as Christian gentlefolk backfired, the second and most famous voyage of the Beagle was born. In naval ter...

"An extraordinary story of bravery and insanity on the high seas. . . . One of the most gripping sea stories I have ever read." — Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect StormIn the tradition of Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, comes a breathtaking piece of maritime history and an oceanic adventure about an obsessive desire to test the limits of human endurance.In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring ...

**“Irresistibly sunny… Set in the brightly lit Mediterranean amid old olive trees and sexual intrigue, music and wine and beautiful women... Propulsive.” –The New York Times Book Review“The perfect book for pretending it's already beach season.” –O, The Oprah MagazineA romantic page-turner propelled by the sixty-year secret that has shaped two families, four lovers, and one seaside resort community.**Set against dramatic Mediterranean Sea views and...

The playwright Peter Nichols was a compulsive diarist all his life. He wrote for himself alone, responding to an urge to record the daily doings, private and professional, of his family, his fellows - and himself. The resulting diaries are candid, insightful, and often as shockingly funny as his plays.This selection, republished to mark the playwright's 90th birthday, covers the extraordinarily fruitful period between his first real hit, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, to t...

"Kal judged they had walked for perhaps twenty minutes when Atilius stopped. Kal not paying a great deal of attention to his companion, walked right into the other man’s back. “This is no time for sleep walking, Kal,” Atilius hissed in annoyance. “So why don’t you wake up from your nap, unless you intended to try to walk up my back.”" Kal Hudson, a Wall-street economist, finds himself in Massalia Gaul.The year is 108 AD and he has no memory of how he got there. He begins to build a busines...

"Peter Nichols has crafted a terrifyingly relevant historical narrative...A terrific read."-Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In The Heart of the SeaIn 1871, America's last fleet of whaling ships was destroyed in an arctic ice storm. Miraculously, 1,218 men, women and children survived, but the disaster was catastrophic at home.Oil and Ice is the story of one fateful whaling season that illuminates the unprecedented rise and devastatin...

Sea Change is Peter Nichols' first book, a biographical account of his own dramatic adventure. When his marriage ended, Nichols had to sell the only thing he and his wife owned - their boat. With only his sextant, his instincts as a seasoned sailor and his memories of a floundering marriage, he sets out from England to sail to America to sell his beloved boat, Toad. Halfway across the Atlantic, Toad springs a leak. As the sea floods in faster, Nichols tries every...

"[A] finely written and thrilling tour de force."–Wall Street JournalA small town in coastal Maine is shaken to its core by a serial killer in this crime novel from Peter Nichols, bestselling author of The RocksIn scenic Granite Harbor, life has continued on―quiet and serene―for decades. That is until a local teenager is found brutally murdered in the Settlement, the town’s historic archaeological s...

Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined."Objectivist" writers, conjoined through a variety of personal, ideological, and literary-historical links, have, from the late 1920s to the present, attracted emulation and suspicion. Representing a nonsymbolist, postimagist poetics and characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological worldview, Objectivists have retai...

"Blue Murder is an absolute cracker, as ingenious as it is riotously funny" (Daily Telegraph)Blue Murder opens with Foreign Bodies, where Swinging London meets bourgeois Shrewsbury and the drinks are laced with cyanide. As the son of the household struggles to write his first play, a murder story is offered to him on a plate. The second half, A Game of Soldiers, is a Whitehall farce taking place in St James's Palace. The same dramatist has brought his complete play to be censored b...

A Piece of My Mind "transforms a self-confessed case of writer's block into a continuously inventive and thought-provoking comedy" (Charles Spencer, London Daily News)"The portrait of a marriage and his strained relationship with his teenage children all seem to come straight from the heart. They are all the more affecting for being described in the context of such immaculate artifice" (Charles Spencer, London Daily News)

A rich selection from the best of Nichols' work up to and including his award-winning Privates on ParadeThis volume continues the stage plays of Peter Nichols, newly revised and introduced by the author. Chez Nous is about English couples who bring their emotional baggage with them on a holiday to France; Privates on Parade is a hit play inspired by the author's experience in Singapore after the war working for the Combined Services Entertainments where he met among others John Sch...