What would it be like to walk into your living room one day and meet a complete stranger who says she’s your mother? It happens to Dizzy on her twelfth birthday. Storm ("Please don’t call me mum!") arrives, and the nice, safe, predictable life Dizzy has made with her father is blown to bits. Storm convinces Dizzy to go away on a short holiday with her—something she says Dizzy’s father has agreed to—and so begins a wild, van-traveling, musicmaking, teepee-sleeping, patchouli-wearing summer! But soon enough the fun wears off, and Dizzy begins to realize that Storm is not the mother Dizzy always dreamed she’d be.
It’s August 1944 and as the Allied forces gain momentum in Europe, a group of loyal German expatriates trapped in Brazil hatch a desperate plan to return to the Motherland. Twenty-seven of them crowd aboard a 19th century, three mast schooner, the Deutschland, in a desperate journey to return home. They must cross five thousand miles of rough sea, and slip past both the American and British navies.
"Magic stirred in me.... I closed my eyes, wanting to lose myself to it.Wanting to use magic in every way I could. But that would be bad. I hadenough magic inside me; I could burn down a city. And I didn't want to dothat...." Allie Beckstrom knows better than most that when magic's involved, youalways pay. Whether the price is migraines, amnesia, or muscle aches, she iscommitted to her work as a Hound, tracing illegal spells back to theircasters. But her job is about to get much more dangerous.
In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces?
On 2 August 1944, in the wake of the complete destruction of the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia, Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in the House of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War. ‘Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler, of Corporal Hitler,’ Churchill jibed. ‘Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in his actions.’ Andrew Roberts’s previous book Masters and Commanders studied the creation of Allied grand strategy; The Storm of War now analyses how Axis strategy evolved.
