Seven Stories from Blackwood's Magazine

About the Book

These seven stories, written between 1965 and 1975 while the author was serving in the Royal Navy, take the reader on travels across the world, from the old Portuguese colony of Macão in China to the sardine fishing grounds off Lisbon; from the island of Lamu on the east coast of Kenya to the cockpit of an Airborne Early Warning aircraft on patrol off Mozambique, and from Pulau Tioman, an island off the east coast of Malaya, to the remote Portuguese vineyards of Vargelas in the upper Douro. Together they form a vivid snapshot of the world as it was in the mid twentieth century.

Blackwood's Magazine was founded in 1817 by the publisher William Blackwood. 'Maga,' as it came to be called, published the works of leading British romanticists Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other famous contributors include the novelists George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and John Buchan. Blackwood's Magazine finally stopped publication in 1980, having been owned and edited throughout its lifetime by the Blackwood family.

About the Author

Television scriptwriter, novelist and thinker, Charles Gidley Wheeler was educated at University College School, London, and the University of Durham. He is the author of Basic Flying Instruction, a work of philosophy, and A Good Boy Tomorrow, a memoir about his upbringing in a evangelical sect from which he broke away on joining the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen.