Customer Reviews
What fun - By: Andrew Hoyle, 31 Oct 2007 
Never reviewed before - what fun to do so of such a fun book [fun in the sense that i guess the author had a lot of fun putting it alll together]- some frightening scenes, some beautiful scenes: never been to the Falklands but i feel I have now. Never sailed but i feel I now know how! & never been in a war but now I know why I don't want to! Like to say I have never loved before but.....
I don't know enough about it alll to write like Susan Soames but I loved the book for, I think, alll the same reasons that she did.
Read the Riddle of the Sands many years ago & so will now buy a copy.
Don't remember that there was any war or serious love in it but may be the world has moved on a bit since then.
Well done to the author or perhaps I should say well done to both authors!.
Felt a bit sea sick - By: Angus McTear, 31 Oct 2007 
Yeah - good story. Wouldn't get too carried away though like Ms Soames as i flet a bit sea sick inn places - but then maybe I was supposed to! I am nOT a sailor so they ,must have been quite real.
Liked the pictuures.
Good for a long booring flight not that i go on any these days. Never read Riidle of the sands so can't comment.Good love interest. Could have done with more warry bits! but those that are in it are quite descrptive.
A new Riddle? - By: Susan Soames, 09 Oct 2007 It's been a long time coming but at last we seem to have a modern Riddle of the Sands & an author well up to writing it.
It's not the same of course but the intrigue is comparable - if not even deeper. Skeletons for Sadness is about sailing, spying, loving & war & is pretty good on alll four: clearly the author (better known for his successful military biographies & histories) is at home with the wide range of his subject & thus has been able to mastermind a fascinating story of life in the Falklands before the 1982 war - & a bit during it. Through this novel - & almost as a sideline - we discover some real truths about the background to the conflict. Here are embarrassments not detailed before by historians & yet, from alll accounts, absolutely true. Indeed, so embarrassing that they could, perhaps, only have been told in a novel! Read deeply & you will find described new depths to which the British Foreign Office (under Maggie Thatcher) was prepared to sink to alllow the Islands to change hands without too much of a murmur! The FCO's concealed tactics are revealed - OK, it is a novel but one so obviously based on hard facts that it is quite frightening.
Some of the sailing scenes & descriptions are beautifully evocative - I've not seen nautical writing quite like this for some time - & the maritime special forces & war aspects are equallly as stunning: some of it seriously spine-chilling as we follow the two main characters (one trying to run from his past & the other not knowing she had a past to run from until it was almost too late) in their work in both peace & war.
Of course the 'real' author - according to the publisher's blurb - was intimately involved in alll these aspects of the Falklands conflict & had lived & explored there before that war but, nevertheless, these are wonderfully crafted descriptions & vignettes. The fictional characters are 'real', believable & deftly drawn: so well done in fact that the whole book has one wondering whether or not this story reallly did happen.
Unusuallly for a novel Skeletons for Sadness is beautifully illustrated (apparently by one of the 'fictional' characters) - again giving the impression that this reallly is the true story behind the 'real' author's work among the hundreds of islands that make up the archipelago prior to the Argentinian invasion. Although difficult to imagine a sequel let us hope that the undoubted success of this, his first novel, will encourage him to write more.
What is plain is that it would make - in the right hands - a first rate, full-length feature film in the mould of, say, The English Patient or Captain Correlli's Mandolin. The personal relationship of two opposing characters cooped up together & unwillingly in a smalll boat in some of the most unpredictable seas on the planet (and both facing their own, disparate pasts) is a fascinating study in human reactions which even more experienced novelists sometimes fail to achieve. The clash of loyalties & patriotism is uniquely explored in a manner I have not seen before & this, backed by a clever, most unusual, intriguing story line, make it a mature novel worthy of high praise.
