Flight to the Sea — James Pattinson

1937: The Japanese have broken through the Great Wall of China. An ageing British ship, the ORIENT QUEEN, is the last of the ships to leave port, north of Shanghai. Fleeing in her are the few remaining refugees. They are an American missionary and his wife Cornelia, John Cooper, a British engineer, and Madame Ninette with some of her girls from the house on Soochow Street. But as the ORIENT QUEEN negotiates the forty odd miles of river to the sea, one disaster follows another...