I'm giving it four-and-a-half stars: this is because IMO it is a brilliant treatment of the political and world-context aspects of the Cuban crisis, but a bit less stellar in the technical and temporal aspects of how the events of the 'Thirteen Days' unfolded. Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest. He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. For example, the famous about-turn of the Soviet ships as they approached the quarantine line north-east of Cuba could be described much more precisely, with on-shore and at-sea timings set against a detailed event-sequence.

Thereafter he worked as a reporter for BBC TV and British newspapers, covering eleven conflicts including Vietnam, the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the 1982 South Atlantic war. We can only be thankful that, in spite of his recklessness, Khrushchev was wise enough not to turn over control of nuclear weapons to Castro. As has become all too apparent in the past weeks, tactical nuclear missiles are still a threat, along with chemical weapons and supersonic missiles.Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women’s Weird, Women’s Weird 2, Elinor Mordaunt’s The Villa and The Vortex and Helen Simpson’s The Outcast and The Rite, all published by Handheld, has curated a selection of Broster’s best and most terrifying work. N]otable historian Hastings provides a narrative more coherent than would have been experienced by the principals, emphasizing how limited information could have led to disaster.

D K Broster was one of the great British historical novelists of the twentieth century, but her Weird fiction has long been forgotten. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password.The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. Set on Colombia’s Pacific coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in the narration until the very end. House plants feature vividly in the book, both in the apartment of our protagonists (where they are referred to as the jungle) and in the home of Gloria Iné What do you think these plants mean for the main characters: for the two women; for child-Claudia; for the father?

He loves little Claudia and we see him taking her out for walks and to the zoo, but his nature means they don’t really communicate or connect. Oddly I have no recollection of it been mentioned by teachers at school either during the event of afterwards. Quintana’s depiction of the jungle is unforgettable, with its countless storms, insects and garbage washed up on the beach.In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.