The Raven reimagines the real-life sinking of a pleasure boat off the coast of New England in 1941. The twist here is that as well as the run-up to the disaster, we see the survivors again in 1952 and finally 1985.

A promising premise, and the book starts very effectively. We are introduced to the key characters, each one in an episode that emphasises the fearsome force of nature, and especially water - floods, gales, storms at sea. The language is heavily poetic - sometimes too poetic, to the point that it occasionally obscured meaning - but it can be very effective:

Clayt tugged at the throttle and the water in back boiled and the boat moved off below them. Land pulled away.

However, once we got to 1952, the focus on nature's power shifted firmly onto people's inhumanity, and the language didn't seem to cope so well with this. Some of the fizz went out of the book, and it became a bit of a slog. I probably wouldn't have finished it, except that in the midst of panicked revision, it seemed like a good idea to be reading something which was easy to put down... ( )