Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

Product Information

Haunting, disturbing, disquieting… dark, passionate, pompous, discordant, controversial – whichever word of power you choose, it is likely to describe both Andreyev and his writing. In reality, a number of the bases they considered to still be under construction had been battle-ready for at least a week; the true number of Soviet personnel in the Caribbean was 43,000.

In his latest, he thoroughly explores a fraught set of circumstances that almost lead to World War III.We should all fear that sometime in the future, a similar crisis will emerge between 2 regional powers, or indeed again between 2 superpowers, but with leaders who are more like Curtis LeMay or Fidel Castro in charge. The opening chapters start with a description of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and continue with the risen to power of Castro, describing the love - hate relationships many Cubans felt towards the USA and the quasi-colonial actions and behaviours of the US Government and many businesses towards Cuba and its citizens. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. In this strikingly vivid novel set in Cali, Colombia, Claudia’s acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them.

Most of Kennedy’s own team – his national security adviser and brother Robert included – favoured this course of action. I really enjoyed the first book in this series, thanks to wonderful characterisation and an interesting mythology which Rayburn has created for her sirens, but felt the second suffered from a love triangle seeming to be shoehorned in and my favourite characters from book 1 not playing too much of a part in it. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy View image in fullscreen US president John F Kennedy with reporters in the White House during a televised speech to the nation about the blockade of Cuba in October 1962. We are given backstories to Claudia’s grandparents, both maternal and paternal, perhaps suggesting how we are tied by circumstance to our fates. When his young assistant Cyprian is caught in an ilicit Adamite cult, Zeno's true identity is exposed and he is condemned to be burned at the stake for, among other things, the crime of atheism.The result is a book to match the best things ever written on the subject in terms of immediacy and drama. This might be my favourite collection of Weird tales yet – a great mix of stories and subjects, with incisive character work … the stories are horrifying for their effects on the people they involve, rather than for the actual supernatural elements – which is not to say the Weirdness isn’t effective and entertaining, because it is, but there’s a deftness of character and a very intense way of description that makes you really empathise with the characters.

The (supposedly collective) decision-making of the presidium of the USSR’s Communist party did not dare to counter Khrushchev’s impulsive plans. Abyss, Pilar Quintana’s second novel to appear in English, is—like its predecessor The Bitch, also translated by Lisa Dillman—concerned with the fraught relationships between caregivers and their dependents. Perhaps Pilar Quintana’s greatest achievement is to immerse us in Claudia’s phantasmagorical jungle without us really noticing, before swiftly unveiling a daughter’s fantasy to a be a mother’s painful reality; to remind us that phantoms are all the more frightening when they are real. The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens.In January this year, Russia’s deputy foreign minister threatened to deploy “military assets” to Cuba if the US continued to support Ukrainian sovereignty. Hastings is generous in describing his role in the Cuban revolution but also highlights his many failures as a national leader once independence had been gained.

Robert McNamara had a leading role which is all the more striking given his perceived later failure during the Vietnam War.Claudia’s father is a reserved man, absorbed in his work and rarely speaking much; her mother on the other hand is still young and pretty, usually staying engaged in reading magazines and interested in the lives of celebrities and movie stars, especially those whose deaths have been mysterious or involved suicide, and in her plants which have overtaken the house so much so that Claudia describes it as a jungle. D K Broster was one of the great British historical novelists of the twentieth century, but her Weird fiction has long been forgotten. A collection of his essays and short fiction about the immeasurable, the inconceivable, and incomprehensible. Early on in the crisis, almost everyone, Kennedy included, agreed to bomb strategic sites and invade, which would likely lead to war. The crew did everything they could to prepare for a dark, below-freezing winter, but they were wracked with despair, suffering headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and later, madness—all vividly capture by Sancton.