From a writer whose books succeed in either subverting or creating genres comes a unique look at an inaccessible world

In November 2011, Geoff Dyer fulfilled a childhood dream of spending time on an aircraft carrier. Dyer's stay on the USS George Bush, on active service in the Arabian Gulf, proved even more intense, memorable, and frequently hilarious, than he could ever have hoped.

In Dyer's hands, the warship becomes a microcosm for a stocktaking of modern Western life: religion, drugs, chauvinism, farting, gyms, steaks, prayer, parental death, relationships and how to have a beach party with 5000 people on a giant floating hunk of steel. Piercingly perceptive and gloriously funny, this is a unique book about work, war and entering other worlds.

"Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully" - * Daily Telegraph *

"Stuffed with wonderful anecdotes" - * Independent *

"One advantage of Dyer's attention to the minutiae of this strange world is the continual surprise of his descriptive powers; he approaches on-board rituals with an art critic's eye that sometimes renders Steele-Perkins's powerfully constructed photographs redundant" - * Observer *

"A hilarious account of life on board an aircraft carrier is filled with delights...If this is the new reality, I hunger for more" - * Telegraph *

"Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain" - * Daily Telegraph *