Alistair Stuart MacLean was a Scottish novelist who wrote successful thrillers or adventure stories, the best known of which are perhaps The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, both having been made into successful films. He also wrote under the pseudonym Ian Stuart. While a university student, MacLean began writing short stories for extra income, winning a competition in 1954 with the maritime story "Dileas". The publishing company Collins asked him for a novel and he responded with HMS Ulysses. From 1963–1966, he took a hiatus from writing to run a hotel business in England, purchasing the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor. The Guns of Navarone is a 1957 novel about the Second World War. It’s the fourth year of the Second World War, in the eastern Mediterranean. The Brits had optimistically dropped men onto all the Greek islands partly as a message to neutral Turkey about who ruled the area, but now the Germans are counter-attacking and have killed or captured the forces on most of the islands. Over a thousand British troops are marooned on the last remaining island of Kheros unless they can be taken off by ship. The Navy refuses to do it because the sea to the North is mined and the only two approaches to the island, so close to the Turkish coast, are governed by the massive German gun emplacement at Navarone. The novel starts with an attempt to bomb them from the air which fails because they are protected by a massive rock overhang… You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Guns of Navarone” by Alistair MacLean on our website.
