Man Overboard

By Tim Binding
December 2005
Picador
ISBN: 0330487477
245 pages, 6 ¼” x 9 ½”
$28.95 Hardcover

ISBN: 0330487485
245 pages, 5 ⅛ x 7 ¾"
$19.50 Paper Original

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In this book, the author tells the story of the man in that godless sanatorium, English war hero Commander Crabb, who disappeared in 1956 amid rumors of his capture by the USSR. Deeply imaginative and gently funny, this novel is a profoundly stirring exploration of Englishness and proves once more that Binding is perhaps our finest chronicler of twentieth-century Britain. Industrious, resilient, fond of his drink, socially awkward and physically fearless, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb was an Englishman who put defense of King and Country above all else.

In Gibraltar, and later Palestine and Italy, his extraordinary feats of underwater daring made him the navy’s greatest frogman and a legend of the Second World War. But Crabb’s private life was both a struggle to achieve human intimacy and a struggle to find his place in post-war Britain. How could someone whose identity was forged in war, who was the friend of government moles and double agents, reconcile himself to the rewards of an ordinary life? When in April 1956, during a visit to Britain by First Secretary Khrushchev, Commander Crabb disappeared, was it by accident or by design? Out of this true story, the author has spun a wondrous piece of fiction – the story of a man who has made deep personal sacrifices for the sake of higher ideals and who must, towards the ends of his days, measure the costs.

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