The Storm Series, Book I. A military and geopolitical thriller.
Malta. John Carroll keeps his past buried. Then the call comes, and answering means facing it.
Out on the Mediterranean, an ageing Irish patrol ship answers a distress call. When the storm breaks, Irish sailors and soldiers are tested to their limits, far from home, for people the world would rather forget.
In Lagos, Ebimie Abari had the house, the family, and the future his powerful patron promised. Then the patron is dead, and Ebimie holds the key to a fortune and to secrets that dangerous men will kill for. He runs with his family: down the Niger, across the Sahara, into the lawless camps of Libya where people are bought and sold. Behind them comes Obi Nwakaeme, the Butcher, who never stops.
Two stories, one sea.
Behind the book
Ruairí de Barra served 25 years in the Irish Naval Service. In 2015 he sailed as Chief of the Engineering Department on the Irish naval flagship LÉ Eithne, the first Irish ship sent to the southern Mediterranean on Operation PONTUS, Ireland’s humanitarian search and rescue mission. Through 2016 and 2017 he trained the crews who followed, sailing with them on passage to the area of operations to ready them for what was waiting. In 2018 he went back in the same role on LÉ Samuel Beckett, with the European naval mission Operation SOPHIA. He saw the crossings up close: the overloaded boats, the people on them, the crews sent out to meet them, and the empty lifejackets in the water. Migrant: A Libyan Storm is fiction, but it is built on that sea. It asks what drives people onto those boats, who profits when they go, and what it costs the sailors left to pick up the pieces.
To those families who risked all to cross the Mediterranean. We will never forget you.
Dedication
Status
- Manuscript: complete, 68 chapters, around 96,000 words.
- Book II: in draft. John Carroll is heading into deeper water.
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