Book description
At the start of World War One, German warships controlled Lake
Tanganyika in Central Africa. The British had no naval craft at all
upon 'Tanganjikasee', as the Germans called it. This mattered: it was
the longest lake in the world and of great strategic advantage. In
June 1915, a force of 28 men was despatched from Britain on a vast
journey. Their orders were to take control of the lake. To reach it,
they had to haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of Mimi and
Toutou through the wilds of the Congo.
The 28 were a strange bunch -- one was addicted to Worcester sauce,
another was a former racing driver -- but the strangest of all of them
was their skirt-wearing, tattoo-covered commander, Geoffrey
Spicer-Simson. Whatever it took, even if it meant becoming the god of
a local tribe, he was determined to cover himself in glory. But the
Germans had a surprise in store for Spicer-Simson, in the shape of
their secret 'supership' the Graf von Gotzen . . .
Unearthing new German and African records, the prize-winning author
of The Last King of Scotland retells this most unlikely of true-life
tales with his customary narrative energy and style.
Fitzcarraldo meets Heart of Darkness, this is rich, vivid and
flashmanesque in its appeal - military history at its most absorbing
and entertaining
Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967 and grew up in Africa.
The author of three novels -- Zanzibar, Ladysmith and The Last King of
Scotland -- he works on the books pages of the Guardian. From 1993 to
1997 he was an assistant editor of the TLS. In 1998 he won the Whitbread
First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Prize.
