Synopsis: "Five miles long, two miles wide and one mile high, she was meant to be the ultimate ocean liner, the crowning achievement of the industrial era; she is the Hope. But after more than thirty years at sea with no landfall in sight, she has become a rust-caked, smoke-belching mockery of her former glory, host to a cargo of loners and losers, madmen and misfits, drudges and deviants. Combining elements of horror and fantasy, James Lovegrove's first novel is an oceangoing fever-dream that blends allegory and satire to nightmarish effect and places the reader aboard a latterday Hobbes's Leviathan that seethes with memorable examples of humankind at its very best—and its very worst." — quoted from the Borealis mass-market paperback's back cover.