Delilah

The twentieth-century classic that inspired a generation of nautical novels. Delilah is an old four-piper destroyer whose regular beat is one of the world's most exotic - and dangerous - bodies of water: the Sulu Sea. Set at the beginning of the American century just before the Great War, this novel tells the story of how the ship and her crew patrol the islands in the time of violent racial and religious unrest. In a series of exquisitely drawn stories, Marcus Goodrich gives the reader a tantalizing glimpse into the heart of each crewmember as the ship puts down Philippine insurrections, searches for a gunrunner's cave told of only in island folklore, and delivers medicine to western missionaries who would rather see the medicine destroyed than have it distributed to non-Christians. What emerges is a sensuous tapestry of the sailors' lives, which are bound inextricably to the fate of their strange family on the Delilah. Here is the return of one of the twentieth century's most important and widely translated novels of the sea.