Deep Sea and Foreign Going

BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Winner of a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship 2011 and a Mountbatten Maritime Award 2013An award-winning investigation into the shady world of international shipping, the hidden industry upon which our world turns and our future dependsThere are 100,000 freighters on the seas. Between them they carry nearly everything we eat, wear and work with. In this unique investigation, Rose George joins the crew of a container ship to chart the murky waters of international shipping, with its powerful naval fleets, pirate gangs, and illegal floating factories, to reveal the hidden industry upon which our world turns and our future depends."Arresting, sharply observed, deeply researched and compelling... Plenty of books promise to reveal the secrets of little-known worlds but few actually deliver. This is one that does" - Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph

Arresting, sharply observed, deeply researched and compelling... Plenty of books promise to reveal the secrets of little-known worlds but few actually deliver. This is one that does, From the always intriguing catalogue of Portobello Books, [this book] goes behind the scenes of those mammoth vessels that ply the oceans bringing us all our lovely stuff, As fascinating as it is troublingly insightful... This is a remarkable work of embedded reportage - hair-raising, witty, compassionate - that deserves to be read, A marvel of information, insight and intelligence laced with humour, humanity and high spirits, With her precise and beautiful clarity of prose, [George] has now fired a brilliant star-shell over the wine-dark sea and the ships that pass in its night, illuminating the details of the invisible ocean industry that is, and always will be, essential to all of us

ROSE GEORGE is the author of A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World (long-listed for the Ulysses Reportage Prize) and The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste (Portobello, 2008; shortlisted for the BMA Book Prize). She contributes regularly to the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent and others. http://rosegeorge.com/site/