Book
An Absence of Imagination
First published 2020
In the mid-1950s, Captain John Sanford takes the merchant ship Da Feng along the Communist Chinese coast and receives orders to transport a man denounced as an enemy of the people. The prisoner’s presence turns a routine command into a test of political coercion, personal conscience and the limits of foreign protection.
Sanford must decide how far he can resist officials who control his ship’s movements and the fate of everyone aboard. The story uses the confined authority of a merchant captain to explore the compromises demanded by Cold War trade and the human cost of treating political persecution as an administrative matter.
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