FICTION / COMING OCTOBER 2026

LATITUDE

For many years a transoceanic passage on a cargo ship was one of the best-kept travel secrets. Now, at a time when global volatility and security sadly make opportunities rarer, it’s more popularly discussed. 

Back in 1976, after an 18-month wander through Central and South America, I had journeyed back to the UK as a passenger on a refrigerated meat ship. First to Montevideo, then 3 weeks up through the South Atlantic to Recife, then on to Las Palmas and finally home. 

Every one of our little group of 8 travellers was, in our own way, slightly deranged. There was something about the mentality of the people who travelled that way that made all of us … eccentric. After 18 months on the road, certainly my brain was frazzled. So we each had a story, and plenty of time, out on the sun or starlit deck, to tell it. 

For nearly 30 years I carried the memory of that intriguing passage, and in 2005 decided to sail again, from Southampton to Shanghai and back, to recapture those seaborne experiences and maybe write a few travellers’ tales of my own.

So Latitude is taking shape as collection of short stories, some real, some fictional. interspersed with whimsical description of the strangeness of life on a huge ship at sea. They’re told to a narrator across a dining table or out on the flying bridge, or on the poop above the roiling wash from the giant propellor during the timeless hours aboard an ocean-going ship.

The stories, like the characters telling them, have nothing in common, except perhaps a slight, unsettling surrealness. And for added spice, Jonathan Gibbs, the central character from But Now You’re Here is one of the passengers, in casual explanation one night of the most significant event in his story. It was to do with a bitter evening at an advertising awards ceremony.  

Latitude will be published later this year‍. To receive an update when the book is published, please sign up to my newsletter here.