The Cruel Sea: The Classic Story Of War At Sea

I read "The Cruel Sea" about 30 years ago, and went back to it this week. It is great writing, and a great story. The characters and dialogue are wonderful. The reader sails into the Battle of the Atlantic, deals with annoying shipmates, survives terrible storms, and the ever-present risk of submarine attack while guarding convoys to Gibraltar, Murmansk, Iceland. Every man who reads it will fall in love with Julie Hallam, and mourn the deaths of shipmates. Especially nice in this 1950's era book, is the absence of obscenity. Monsarrat allows the reader to fill in the blanks with his own language of abuse. There is no graphic adult sexuality, either, so I think this book could be appropriate for young adults.

A classic is a book that perdures through generations. This book is a great classic and worthy of all the praise, description, and commentary offered above. I've reviewed a lot of books on here, but this is the first time I've felt I could add nothing meaningful or significant to the excellent words already written. This is a wonderful, important book about men and the sea, about life and love, about war and peace, about ethics and human conduct, about reason and emotion. Highly recommended.

The book is excellent, despite the fact that we haven't been able to determine whether it's fiction or a true story. Hubby saw the movie, so he pretty much knew what was going to happen before it happened. The problem we had with the book is the language and terminology. (For that reason, I had to give it 4 stars instead of 5.) We're not English, and we've never been in the Navy, so much of it was pure Greek to us. I would read a paragraph or two to hubby, then we'd look at each other with a big question mark over our heads, wondering what we had just read, what the characters were even talking about! It's definitely a British Navy book written by a Brit FOR Brits, not Americans. Still, it's a good book, hard to put down.

Very good book on British Navy in WWII
You will have to work with British humor