Adrift in the Atlantic with a corrupt Tory M.P.

Surrounded by sharks.

Low on booze…

Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary celebrities that included Dickens, Lytton, Ainsworth and Thackeray. Now he’s a nobody, scratching a living as a freelance journalist writing for a penny a line. Worse, the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Outed as a friend of Dickens at the captain’s table, Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.

Lost for over a century, Jack Vincent’s memoirs offer a history of the English novel that they don’t teach you in school, from his apprenticeship with the original Bill and Nancy to the boudoirs and brothels of Victorian London, while all the time the ship draws ever closer to Shark Alley…