[A] propulsive, finely detailed seafaring saga.

The most gripping true-life sea yarn I’ve read in years.

[Grann] has found not just a good but a great story, fraught with duplicity, terror and occasional heroism.

The material that Grann has to work with is again unwieldy. He sets up his story as a mystery.

The Wager is unadorned, almost pure, horror-filled plot, without the usual Grannian first-person moments, a tightly written, relentless, blow-by-blow account that is hard to put down, even as there are sometimes frustrating narrative gaps, a result of the limits of nonfiction grappling with 280-year-old events. For all the hours we spend with Cheap, Bulkeley and the others, they remain inaccessibly distant..

Enthralling, seamlessly crafted.

The story of the shipwreck and its aftermath features scenery-chewing characters, unexpected twists and an almost unimaginable amount of human misery. Grann...tells it with style. He manages to wring maximum drama out of the events and sketch out nuanced portraits of key players on the doomed ship. Journal entries made on the voyage gave Grann a window into their thoughts and fears..

Now comes a series of twists and turns worthy of a well-plotted thriller.

Grann is one of America’s most meticulous narrative nonfiction writers.

Grann, who spent five-plus years working on the book, is expert at stitching together the available facts so deftly that we hardly notice the gaps. He draws on other contemporary seafaring accounts to round out the narrative and splices in his own atmospheric descriptions of quaking seas and creaking hulls.

A great weave of many yarns: a naval adventure for fans of Patrick O’Brian, a story of seafaring for armchair navigators, a tale of men in adversity for moral philosophers, an account of printing and publishing for book historians and a great read for all of us tossed around on the waves of our 'post-truth' society..

Conventional tropes are flipped on their heads when a meager band of mutinying survivors struggles to stay alive.

The story is packed with powerful vignettes of skill, loyalty and courage as well as incompetence, misconduct and cruelty.

Page-turning.

While the story of HMS Wager is well known, David Grann brings a distinctive and specialized approach to his treatment of it. He has carefully built his book on a firm knowledge of the published historical literature on the period and an extensive examination of the manuscript sources in a wide range of archives in England, Scotland, Australia and the United States.

[An] unbelievable odyssey.

By the second paragraph you know this is going to be a good book.

Thrilling.

Vivid.

Grann vividly narrates a nearly forgotten incident with an eye for each character’s personal stakes while also reminding readers of the imperialist context prompting the misadventure..

Concise and riveting.

A rousing story.