It's amazing the problems drinking can get you into. One little swig from an oddly-shaped bottle and you go from being an ordinary Dutch sea-captain to an unhappy immortal, drifting around the world with your similarly immortal crew, unable to stay in port for long owing to side effects we won't go into right now. You become a creature of myth and legend. Worst of all, Richard Wagner writes an opera about you.

Cornelius Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, has the unexpected experience of hearing himself discussed in a pub during one of his few-and-far between landfalls. To add insult to injury, the young man talking about him gets almost everything wrong. Little does Vanderdecker suspect that this chance encounter might just lead to the end of his cursed life, one way or another. Together with his crew, a BBC film crew (one of whom is still investigating Milk Marketing Board conspiracy theories), a scientist who invented everything, and Jane Doland, who works for the National Lombard Bank, the Dutchman falls into a series of events which even the composer of The Ring of the Nibelungs might consider overly coincidental and chaotic.

Tom Holt, author of Expecting Someone Taller and Who's Afraid of Beowulf?, has written his funniest, most original book yet. He has more than justified his place as a leading writer of humorous fantasy.

Condition: Pre-loved book. Minor yellowing of pages. Otherwise in good condition.

Format: Hardcover
Year published: 1991
Pages: 252
Sub-genre: Fantasy; humour.
Imprint: Orbit