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Books

The most gripping sea-catastrophe writing I have read outside Conrad

David Vann’s memoir, A Mile Down, about his disastrous career at sea is an irresistible read

10 October 2015

9:00 AM

10 October 2015

9:00 AM

A Mile Down: The true story of a disastrous career at sea David Vann

William Heinemann, pp.242, £18.99, ISBN: 9780434021956

When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread, as Vann puts it, ‘of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be’, and who had failed first as a dentist and then as a commercial fisherman in Alaska — blew his head off while talking on the phone to his second wife.

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