Already there is heated debate on the nature, the purpose, and the implications of this commemoration. Next year we mark the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the Atlantic slave trade – though both the trade, and New World slavery itself, continued for many more years. Somehow it just doesn’t have a credible ring.Gillian Slovo co-wrote the documentary play ‘Guant?mo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ (Oberon Books). Now it appears these rogues are, in adversarial concord with crazy Washington neo-cons, gearing up for a new confrontation. It’s a curious choice: a thriller that starts in Guant?mo before winding itself into a coming battle not against al-Qa’ida or Syria or Iran or even North Korea, but a far-fetched, Cuban giant. And then there is the Cuban subplot that gradually mutates into central plot. Falk, you see, is a man so stunningly na? as a young Marine that he got blackmailed by dastardly Cubans.

The prisoners are, in the main, one undifferentiated mass – some falsely accused, yes, but none really human. Their guards are worse: strange clod-hopping ciphers who allow our hero to journey into all sorts of forbidden places on his un-provable say-so that he has his general’s authority.In place of differentiated characters we get variety in surname: from Falk’s dubious friend, Bokamper, who may or may not be helping him (while he may or may not be trying to steal Falk’s dull girlfriend, Pam), to the sinister Van Meter, whose name alone suggests that he is the probable baddie. Whereas Moazzam Begg’s real-life account of his incarceration in Guant?mo (written with Victoria Brittain) is at its most eloquent when describing guards and interrogators, whose conversation ranges from the cooking of escargots to the legacy of Marcus Garvey, Fesperman’s Americans are curiously blank. And while Begg inducts us into a bizarre and hidden world where inmates nickname psychiatrists “Hitchcocks” (after Psycho) and guards wear combat uniforms with the US flag facing the wrong way because they are “charging towards the enemy”, Fesperman’s thriller, after his first stab at the camp’s stifling claustrophobia, winds on with less and less texture.The plot rattles because it is so laboured. They seem uninterested in the outside world, unbothered by the sudden arrest of one of their Arabic-speaking translators, or by an investigative team that inexplicably incarcerates them. Leave aside doubts as to whether idiot 19-year-olds who stumble into jihad, as Adnan is said to have done, are actually members of local al-Qa’ida cells who have sugar daddies; what we now expect is the unfolding of a story that will end with Falk as a prisoner.
Falk is ordered by Gitmo’s general-in-charge to investigate the mysterious drowning of Sergeant Earl Ludwig, and his corpse’s tide-defying flotation onto Cuban soil. No sooner does Falk begin than three sinister men fly in from Washington.

It becomes clear that no one wants Falk to uncover the secret of Ludwig’s death. He begins to realise that his own youthful indiscretions are somehow connected with whatever is going on.The atmosphere Fesperman builds at the novel’s beginning soon dissipates. He’s an Arabic-speaking interrogator who coaxes rather than tortures information from his suspects And his patience is paying off. He is on the brink of uncovering the name of the “sugar daddy and bankroller” of the half-crazed Yemeni detainee Adnan al-Hamdi. What unfolds instead in Dan Fesperman’s novel is a clotted tale, part detective procedural and part international spy thriller It becomes increasingly puzzling as its plot spins out. Falk, first name Revere (a name given by a father so awful that Falk has declared himself an orphan), is one of the good guys. It starts with the body of an American soldier that washes up on the Cuban side of the Guant?mo fence, before the action moves into the Gitmo base itself.

There, our hero, FBI interrogator Falk, is set on a series of events that will lead to “his transition from captor to captive”. And the stage is set for a thriller that will put the guards themselves in jeopardy as it lifts the lid on what it’s like to inhabit this American gulag. Their champions were few and in Samuel Plimsoll, “the sailor’s friend”, they recognised a great humanitarian.Sarah Burton’s books include ‘A Double Life’ (Penguin). This book rehabilitates a man who remains a household name, but whose legion achievements have been forgotten. Plimsoll emerges as a great reformer whose passion sometimes got the better of his judgement.He was criticised as obsessive, self-promoting, mentally unbalanced, and ill-informed – charges with which Jones engages fairly and squarely – but the ordinary people who turned out in their thousands to support him wherever he went told a different story. Safety has never been an exciting subject, but as Nicolette Jones states: “It is the fact that [the load line] was opposed at all, and the motives for that opposition, that turned its implementation from a bureaucratic procedure into a stirring crusade, and makes the line a monument to victory in an epic battle for justice and right.”Jones’s account is entirely worthy of its deserving subject.

Very few old ships were withdrawn from service, but were often sailed until they sank, with the consequence that one in five sailors lost their lives at sea.The Plimsolls campaigned for ships to be licensed as seaworthy before they set out from British ports, and for a load line to be painted on the hull. The callous indifference of shipowners to the devastating loss of life was compounded by the fact that no pensions were paid to sailors’ widows and, in some cases, even the dead men’s back pay was withheld.Plimsoll and his wife Eliza, in setting out to remedy this appalling exploitation, took on the might of property and Parliament, both of which strenuously resisted any reforms that might compromise profit. Plimsoll, however, demanded common-sense measures to make life at sea safer.Carrying loose cargo or loading cargo on deck were known to be severely detrimental to stability, but such corner-cutting was widespread. Between 1870 and 1872 alone, 1,628 sailors were incarcerated for this “crime”. In one tragic case, two successive crews chose jail rather than go aboard a ship eventually crewed by boys no older than 17 It was lost with all hands.