Cruise Ships

A luxury cruise can feel like the safest place in the world - until the sea reminds everyone what lies beneath the holiday.

Cruise Ships: The Deadliest Tales takes readers inside ten extraordinary true stories of disaster, survival, fire, collision, hijacking and near-catastrophe aboard passenger ships around the world.

From the astonishing sinking of Oceanos, where entertainers found themselves helping to organise an evacuation after the ship's command structure began to collapse, to the chaos aboard Costa Concordia, the disappearance of Fantome in Hurricane Mitch, the deadly fire aboard Yarmouth Castle, and the terrifying night when Viking Sky drifted towards the Norwegian coast without propulsion, these are stories in which ordinary voyages changed within minutes.

Drawing on official investigations, contemporary reporting and documented survivor accounts, David Martin reconstructs what happened aboard each vessel while explaining the human decisions, engineering failures and remarkable acts of courage that determined who survived.

Some ships sank. Others came frighteningly close. In several cases, survival depended on decisions made by people who had never expected to become rescuers.

Ten true stories. Thousands of lives at stake. One unforgiving constant: the sea.

For readers fascinated by maritime disasters, survival stories, unexplained events and the moments when enormous machines fail in extraordinary ways, Cruise Ships: The Deadliest Tales is the fifth volume in The Deadliest Tales series.