This is the incredible true story of Ferzanna Riley, a Pakistani Muslim who could not be broken, despite an abusive family and their brutal efforts to enslave her. Her violent childhood, during which she was beaten on an almost daily basis, transformed her into a desperate and suicidal teenager, and led her to question the faith and culture she had been born into. After starting a new life in London, a shocking turn of events led Ferzanna and her younger sister to be tricked by their family into going into Pakistan, where they were held captive. Inspiring and moving, this astonishing story paints a picture of an amazing woman who broke the cycle of abuse and survived against all the odds.

"The tale of Carl Wake and the hurricane that was waiting for him goes straight to the heart of the greatest sea stories: they are not about man against the sea, but man against himself. John Kretschmer's book is as perfectly shaped and flawlessly written as such a story can be. In addition to being the best depiction I have ever read of what it is like to be inside a hurricane at sea, At the Mercy of the Sea is as moving a story of a man's failure and redemption as can be found anywhere in the literature of the sea. This book is surely destined to become a classic."--Peter Nichols, author of "Sea Change" and "A Voyage for Madmen"

"John Kretschmer has transformed this story of three men on a collision course with a hurricane into a modern seafaring classic."--Peter Nielsen, editor of "SAIL" magazine

"John Kretschmer's account of three fellow captains whose lives converge in one of history's most erratic hurricanes builds like the storm itself. Detail after detail reveals the sailors' personal histories, their foibles, their goals, and finally their tragic miscalculations. With expert analysis and taut writing, he draws readers into that mad storm. You can't turn away. You keep reading until it breaks your heart."--Fred Grimm, columnist for the "Miami Herald"

"John Kretschmer is a first-class seaman who is also a fine writer. Once begun, his vivid and powerful narrative is impossible to put down."--Derek Lundy, author of "Godforsaken Sea" and "The Way of a Ship"

""At the Mercy of the Sea" kept me plunging ahead to the tragic end and left me feeling humbled and lucky to be alive. I felt I knew Carl Wake, because John Kretschmer found in him an archetype--an aging sailor with an age-old dream."--Jim Carrier, transatlantic sailor and author of "The Ship and the Storm: Hurricane Mitch and the Loss of the Fantome"

"Gathering his tools as a loyal friend, a master mariner, and a natural storyteller, John Kretschmer has crafted an unforgettable tale of high-seas adventure, salvation, and loss. A remarkable book, impossible to put down."--Herb McCormick, sailing journalist

John Kretschmer, a professional sailor and writer, has logged more than 200,000 offshore sailing miles, including fifteen transatlantic and two transpacific passages. He is a longtime contributing editor to "Sailing" magazine and a sailing/travel columnist for the "Miami Herald". John lives aboard a 47-foot cutter in Florida. He and his student Carl Wake, the subject of this book, were close friends.

Bless me Father is the true story of an incredible South African Life. Born into a violent and brocken family, and growing up in a variety of institutions, Cape Town based poet and writer Mario d' Offizi tells his remarkable, often shocking and ultimately inspiring life adventure-one that spans several decades in a country undergoing radical change. From his tough days at Boys Town to wild years in the advertising world, a stint in the restaurant business and a sharp edged journalistic adventure in the DRC, d'Offizi tells his critically acclaimed story with the unfailing sensitivity and warmth of a true poet.

Jimmy Holland was born into a family suffering at the hands of their drunk and abusive father. At the age of just two weeks, he was placed into care. The beginning of a life lived in a constantly changing environment of homes, authorities and institutions began. Let down and frequently abused, it wasn't long before Jimmy strayed onto the wrong side of the tracks. Before long, the mould for a problem child was set. He quickly turned from substance abuse to drug use and, in turn, to crime - his only means of an escape. An inevitable lifetime of crime faced him and he soon became associated with the ringleaders of an infamous gang responsible for prison riots and hostage taking. A heartfelt, shocking and despairing insight into life as a state-raised boy, "Lost in Care" is the heart-rending tale of a man who has lost his childhood and also lost his way.

This is a true story about real people set in the 1960-70's, Alan Stuart Hutcheson, a millionaire before forty had everything; a successful business, an exciting social life; a top model wife amongst a litter of lovers and he lost it all in one calamitous moment.
After Military and Merchant Navy service, he became a champion, well-known top racing driver. Feeling a debt to society, he became a probation officer and learned a lot about police corruption, violence, and falsified evidence.
One evening he was driving through West End London when an accident occurred at the mouth of Hyde Park underpass. One of the girls involved died a week later as a result of shocking medical negligence. Alan was charged with causing death by dangerous driving and given a two year prison sentence. During his first night he attempted suicide but with intensive medical care he survived.
Constantly victimized by the authorities and kept on hard drugs, his time served was mentally and physically tortuous and he not only lost his wife but his thriving business too. Sometime after his release he was accused of murdering his ex-Managing Director and faced a prison sentence; by this time the police were hot on his tail and further falsified evidence was made against him, placing him in another prison sentence.
Through higher level police contacts, he managed to get and early appeal and due to a piece of excellent fortune, he once again became a free man. However, after this Alan felt it safer to live in Spain.
This book is imbued with humour and drama and includes people such as Oliver Reed, Peter Sellers, Stirling Moss, Barry Sheene, Prince of Hanover, Jilly Johnson, Mai Britt and many otherfamous and infamous people making this a compelling memoir well worth reading.

**Now watch the BBC drama Doing Money** 'They took me because I would not be missed' This is the shocking true story of how an ordinary young girl was kidnapped off the street as she walked home and turned into a slave - before fighting for her freedom and finding the courage to help the police in one of the UK's most shocking modern-day slavery trials. Anna was an innocent student when she was kidnapped, beaten and forced into the sex slave industry. Threatened and tormented by her pimps, she was made to sleep with thousands of men. But she would not allow them to break her. On learning that she would be trafficked from Ireland to Dubai, she found the courage to trick her captors and flee. Later, she would also find that same resilience to help the police bring down her abductors in what has now become one of our biggest windows into the worldwide sex trafficking trade. For the first time, the girl at the centre of the storm reveals the heart-breaking truth.

In Karachi in 1986, four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists storm a Pan Am jumbo jet as the passengers embark. The pilots escape, the terrorists shoot a passenger & throw his body out of the plane. They collect the passports & call Michael Thexton to the front of the plane as the next hostage to die. This is his extraordinary story.

The million-rand teaspoon is a true story, told by several narrators, of a young man's descent into drug addiction, a serious overdose that left him blind and brain-damaged, and his struggle to recover over the next nine years. Written entirely in the first person, Paul Bateman's story is narrated by him in some chapters, and, in others, by various members of his family, his ex-girlfriend, and a woman who was involved in his protracted but only ever partial recovery. The title is divided into two parts - the first covering Paul's years of addiction and the second detailing his struggle to regain some kind of life up until the present. The title refers to Paul's father's recollection of finding only a teaspoon in his son's otherwise denuded flat (Paul had sold everything else, but kept the teaspoon to cook up drugs). The spoon came to symbolise for him the years of struggling with Paul's addiction, and the financial cost of that struggle.

This distinctive volume contains twenty first-person narrative essays from Holocaust survivors who were children at the time of the atrocity. As children aged two to sixteen, these authors had different experiences than their adult counterparts and also had different outlooks in understanding the events that they survived. While most Holocaust memoirs focus on one individual or one country, ""And Life Is Changed Forever"" offers a varied collection of compelling reflections. The survivors come from Germany, Poland, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia. All of the contributors escaped death, but they did so in myriad ways. Some children posed as Gentiles or were hidden by sympathizers, some went to concentration camps and survived slave labor, some escaped on the Kindertransports, and some were sent to endure hardships in a ""safe"" location such as Siberia or unoccupied France. While each essay is intensely personal, all speak to the universal horrors and the triumphs of all children who have survived persecution. ""And Life Is Changed Forever"" also focuses on what these children became - teachers, engineers, physicians, entrepreneurs, librarians, parents, and grandparents - and explores the impact of the Holocaust on their later lives.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author Dr Amanda Brown. Insights into the world of a Prison Doctor, this time taking us deeper into the walls of Bronzefield, the UK's biggest women's prison. From the drug addicts who call Amanda 'the mother I never had' to the women who've pushed back at domestic abuse, to women close to release in their 70s, who just want to stay in the place that they've always known, these are stories that are heartbreaking, harrowing and heart-warming. Amanda listens, prescribes, and does what she can. After all, she's their doctor.

The extraordinary wreck of a majestic ship, a mysteriously missing crew, a message in a bottle, the lost captain's determined daughter - these are all elements of a great sea yarn, and one that happens to be true. Bland Simpson weaves them together in this compelling nonfiction novel, his reconstruction of a ghost ship's final voyage in 1921 and its baffling aftermath. To this day, the fate of the Carroll A. Deering has remained one of the great mysteries of maritime history. Simpson's haunting chronicle keeps the story alive, an apt memorial to the ghost ship and its lost crew.

On October 15, 1954, Hurricane Hazel battered southern Ontario, leaving in its wake a terrible toll: thousands homeless, million in property damage, and, worst of all, 81 people dead. Hazel destroyed bridges, submerged towns, and drowned unsuspecting Ontarians in their homes and cars. Raymore Drive in Weston was decimated when the Humber River swelled by eight feet, taking the lives of 32 residents in only one hour. In Etobicoke, five volunteer firemen drowned while trying to reach marooned motorists. Towns and villages from Toronto north to Timmins felt Hazel's fury.

After the storm, people walked the now-surreal streets of their towns: cars upside-down and wrapped in power lines, iceboxes and dead cows hanging from trees, houses flattened, toys and furniture floating down the street.

On the 50th anniversary of the storm, Jim Gifford has captured that fatal night in the voices of those who survived it, from residents who lived along the surging Humber River to a policeman who rescued families from their rooftops to firemen and Boy Scouts who searched for victims along the riverbanks. Including more than 100 never-before-published photographs, Hurricane Hazel: Canada's Storm of the Century documents one of the worst natural disasters in Canadian history.

In the autumn of 1993, American special forces were dispatched to the famine-stricken land of Somalia. Their intervention in this war-torn country was the most dramatic US military action since Vietnam. A routine mission went horribly wrong when Michael Durant's Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Mogadishu and he was quickly surrounded by Somali troops and taken captive. The brutal torture he underwent was made all too clear to the world when his coerced statements were broadcast on live television and his battered face appeared on the cover of magazines around the globe. Michael Durant's ordeal was first described in Mark Bowden's international bestseller Black Hawk Down and the critically acclaimed film of the same name. This, his first-person gripping account tells of bravery under fire, torture, imprisonment, and the terrifying day by day reality for a soldier, unarmed and helpless in enemy hands, fighting to survive.

The Honey Bus: A Girl Raised by Bees is a memoir about a girl's journey into the heart of a beehive to find herself. When she was five years old, Meredith May was abandoned by both parents. Her father left for the other side of the country. Her mother disappeared into herself. But when Meredith discovered the rusted old bus where her grandpa kept bees, her world changed forever. Family duty. Compassion and sacrifice. Unconditional love. The life of a honeybee displays it all. As her grandpa showed her the sacrifices bees make for their colony and the bonds they form with their keeper, Meredith discovered what family really means. A rich and lyrical coming-of-age story, combined with spellbinding nature writing, The Honey Bus is the extraordinary story of a girl who journeyed into the hive - and found herself.

Fran Stiff is a silicone gel survivor. Implanted with silicone gel-filled breast implants in November 1981 she was told it was a 'one off' and that the implants would last a lifetime. It was the beginning of a 22-year nightmare. Intended to enhance her beauty, the procedure had the opposite result. By 1983 her right breast had become hard and deformed. The implant had ruptured and loose silicone gel had been broadcast into her breast and other bodily tissues. This was surgically removed and the implant replaced. By May 1989 her right breast had re-hardened, but this time she was unable to find a plastic surgeon willing to deal with it. They were only prepared to explant the implants, because they said the hardening would only reoccur. This would have left her with a grossly deformed chest and no breasts. She refused, deciding it was preferable to live with the deformity. She found herself progressively afflicted with major allergies and rheumatism. It was only in 1997 – 16 years after the first implantations – that she found a plastic surgeon who was prepared to tackle her problems. After a string of operations to remove the remnants of silicone gel that remained in her body and the replacement of both her implants with saline-filled ones, Fran is at last at the stage she had thought she had reached in 1981. Even her silicone gel-inspired allergies and rheumatism has begun to diminish. While silicone gel implants have been banned in the USA since 1992, their virtually unregulated use has continued in the European Union, South Africa and elsewhere. Effectively, women there have been used as lab rats by manufacturers of silicone gel breast implants to gather data for the FDA so that their products might be allowed back on the lucrative US market.

Stories of Sailors in the Clutch of the SeaEdited by Tom Lochhaas Treacherous Waters is a collection of riveting, real life stories of adventure, loss, and survival at sea.

Garnered from among the best writing about sailing and the sea from the past 40 years, it transports readers to remote polar waters, lee shores, forbidding capes, and into the hearts of tempests. Here is triumph, disaster, love, courage, guilt, rescue, and death as captured by Webb Chiles (The Open Boat), Rob Mundle (Fatal Storm), Jim Carrier (The Ship and the Storm), Gordon Chaplin (Dark Wind), Tami Oldham Ashcroft (Red Sky in Mourning), and 15 others.

Two sisters. One extraordinary true story. Germany, 1945. Trapped between advancing armies, stranded hundreds of miles from their mother, and with their father missing in action, sisters Barbie and Eva were confronted with an impossible choice. Should they stay and face invasion or risk their lives to find their mother? Together, they set out on a perilous three-hundred mile journey on foot across a country ravaged by war. Fuelled by courage and love, Eva and seven-year-old Barbie encounter incredible hardship, extraordinary bravery, and overwhelming generosity. Against all odds, they both survived. But neither sister came out of the journey unscathed . . . This is the powerful true story of their escape.

Nora Strejilevich was a young woman when her brother and other family members and friends disappeared at the hands of the military junta that held power in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Ostensibly part of a systematic campaign to eliminate left-wing terrorism, the violence perpetrated by the junta far exceeded anything the leftists ever dreamed of, enveloping not only the violent left but other dissidents and innocent civilians as well, and particularly targeting the Jewish population. A "desaparecida" herself, Strejilevich survived kidnapping and torture to speak of her experience with a dignified voice and a clear-eyed realism that extends from one end of the political spectrum to the other.

In the first English translation of her elegant fictional memoir "Una sola muerte numerosa," Strejilevich combines autobiography, documentary journalism, fiction, magical realism, and poetry to express the "choir of voices" of the more than 30,000 souls who were imprisoned and abused. She engages the reader in the history of a bloody military coup and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, exploring themes of exile, identity, and violence. Above all, "A Single, Numberless Death" is Nora Strejilevich's gripping story of survival.

Having quit engineering, Bucher became involved in exploration of the Northland of Canada, primarily the high-Arctic. The story in hand is about a scientific exploration on the ice-covered offshores in the Queen Elizabeth Islands. It is not a scientific essay or just another adventure book. It is a reconstruction of an Arctic exploration that can never be restored or repeated in the way it was conducted, nor in its significance as a scientific endeavor--it was a first and only.
The main theme of the story revolves around the ways this remote and, at that time, mostly unexplored part of the Arctic affected me: the loneliness, the cold, the harsh beauty, the physical and mental stress the author endured, and the addictive effect the Arctic had on him.
Companion volume: The Calling and the Spell

A breathtaking account of the world's most gruelling yacht race. The world's greatest round-the-world yacht race is the Volvo Ocean Race. The men and women who compete have an insatiable appetite for tough competition, danger and the challenge of life-threatening experiences. It is a competition in which they must cover more than 32,000 miles (52,600 km) in nine months and conquer the world's oceans. It's non-stop racing. To win the battle they must overcome the elements - from the mind-bending frustration and oppressive heat of tropical calms, to the icy blasts that drive through the minefield of icebergs deep in the Southern Ocean. This is a story about human endeavour and testing the limits of physical and mental endurance. It's also the story of team cohesion and racing to the max as we delve inside the struggles and triumphs of one particular team, Team News Corp, as they battle to become the world's best ocean warriors.

When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and record ninety-foot seas during a savage storm in January 1998, her five crewmen are left to drift without a life raft in the freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can.

One hundred fifty miles away, in Sitka, Alaska, an H-60 Jayhawk helicopter lifts off from America's most remote Coast Guard base in the hopes of tracking down an anonymous Mayday signal. A fisherman's worst nightmare has become a Coast Guard crew's desperate mission. As the crew of the La Conte begin to die one by one, those sworn to watch over them risk everything to pull off the rescue of the century.

Spike Walker's memoir of his years as a deckhand in Alaska, Working on the Edge, was hailed by James A. Michner as "masterful . . . will become the definitive account of this perilous trade, an addition to the literature of the sea." In Coming Back Alive, Walker has crafted his most devastating book to date. Meticulously researched through hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the survivors, this is the true account of the La Conte's final voyage and the relationship between Alaskan fishermen and the search and rescue crews who risk their lives to save them.

The names William Bligh, Fletcher Christian, and the Bounty have excited the popular imagination for more than two hundred years. The story of this famous mutiny has many beginnings and many endings but they all intersect on an April morning in 1789 near the island known today as Tonga. That morning, William Bligh and eighteen surly seamen were expelled from the Bounty and began what would be the greatest open-boat voyage in history, sailing some 4,000 miles to safety in Timor. The mutineers led by Fletcher Christian sailed off into a mystery that has never been entirely resolved.

While the full story of what drove the men to revolt or what really transpired during the struggle may never be known, Penguin Classics has brought together-for the first time in one volume-all the relevant texts and documents related to a drama that has fascinated generations. Here is the full text of Bligh's Narrative of the Mutiny, the minutes of the court proceedings gathered by Edward Christian in an effort to clear his brother's name, and the highly polemic correspondence between Bligh and Christian-all amplified by Robert Madison's illuminating Introduction and rich selection of subsequent Bounty narratives.

Like Last of the Just, which traced the Jewish experience of martyrdom, this book recreates through fact and myth people's enslavement and humiliation, and survival -- and produces one of the most extraordinary heroines in black literature.

NOW OUT IN CINEMAS, STARRING COLIN FIRTH, MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS AND LEA SÉYDOUX

'It takes you through each nail-biting moment . . . heart-breaking, humane and, at times, all too vivid. I've rarely read such a gripping work of non-fiction' COLIN FIRTH

At 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August 2000, two massive explosions roared through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, pride of the Northern Fleet and the largest attack submarine in the world, was hurtling towards the ocean floor.

In Kursk (originally published as A Time to Die), award-winning journalist Robert Moore vividly recreates this disaster minute by minute. Venturing into a covert world where the Cold War continues out of sight, Moore investigates the military and political background to the tragedy. But above all, he tells the nail-bitingly poignant human story of the families waiting ashore, of the desperate efforts of British, Norwegian and Russian rescuers, and of the Kursk sailors, trapped in the aft compartnemt, waiting for rescue, as a horrified world followed their battle to stay alive . . .

In the late 1970s, author Warren Fellows and two of his friends had the perfect scheme: they would traffic heroin between Australia and Thailand, concealing it flawlessly in high-tech, invisible compartments in suitcases. The money was there, and the process seemed foolproof--especially because they hadn't gotten caught in all their prior attempts at smuggling. But in 1978, all that would change, and Fellows would spend the next twelve years of his life enduring violations of his human rights of unimaginable hideousness.

Fellows, convicted in Thailand, spent these twelve years in Bangkok's infamous Bang Kwang prison, witnessing atrocities committed by both prison officials and his fellow inmates. He survived countless torturous beatings, was forced to eat rats, and endured solitary confinement under terrifyingly inhumane conditions. On a daily basis, Fellows also witnessed the torture and execution of those around him, their screams as common as the insects and vermin in his cell. Many of the prisoners in Bang Kwang turned to heroin--the vice that landed Fellows there in the first place--to escape their daily nightmares, and the prison guards often helped feed this deadly addiction.

Fellows, now a free man, has lived to write about these twelve ghastly years. He has captured the filth, pain, anger, hopelessness, and torture of life in a Thai prison with vivid, engrossing detail and brutal honesty.