A Son of the Sun
1912
The South Pacific in 1900 was a place where fortune seekers came to get rich or die trying. Jack London knew this world firsthand, and in A Son of the Sun he paints it in savage, unforgettable colors. Captain David Grief arrived in these waters a young man. Now he's forty, wealthy beyond measure, and deeply entangled in a world of traders, pirates, cannibals, and men who have escaped civilization's laws entirely. He owns offices in Sydney but rarely visits them. His wealth is scattered across a hundred islands, and each journey between them is a gamble with death. The eight stories in this collection follow Grief through reef passages, tropical storms, and confrontations with the men who exploit both the islands and their inhabitants. Here are adventurers and swindlers, old salts and young fools, traders who deal fairly and those who deal in human lives. London witnessed these things during his own voyage on the yacht Snark, and his prose carries the weight of firsthand knowledge. This is adventure fiction at its rawest: sun-bleached, danger-fraught, and unflinching in its portrait of a world where the rules of so-called civilization barely apply.
