This novel is about going to sea and the difficulty of trying to find a way back again. If one half of Stone's characters live their secret, interior lives apart from society, then the other half are desperately looking for their own ways out: drugs, murder, revolution, betrayal, infidelity; and in the case of the character Owen Browne, sailing off the map of the world and mind altogether.
Stone writes superbly about the sea, about fear and loneliness, about life. The themes are contemporary and touched with cruelty.
Robert Stone's first novel, 'A Hall of Mirrors', won a William Faulkner Foundation Award; 'Dog Soldiers' received a National Book Award; 'A Flag for Sunrise' won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
