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A book that caused a huge sensation when it was first published in 1903, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers is a vivid account of German preparations to invade England, released at a time when tensions between the two countries were at an all time high. Named by The Guardian newspaper as one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, The Riddle of the Sands has delighted generations of sailing aficionados and thriller readers with its nautical and political verisimilitude.
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Robert Erskine Childers DSC, better known as Erskine Childers, was an English-born Irish nationalist who rose to prominence as a writer with accounts of the Second Boer War, the novel The Riddle of the Sands about German plans for a sea-borne invasion of England, and proposals for Irish independence. Childers, a fervent believer in the British Empire, served as a volunteer in the army expeditionary force during the Second Boer War in South Africa, but his experiences there triggered a progressive disenchantment with British empire. Childers was born in Mayfair, London in 1870. He was the second son of Robert Caesar Childers, an ecclesiastical translator and oriental scholar, and Anna Mary Henrietta Barton, an Anglo-Irish landowner from Glendalough House, Annamoe, County Wicklow, who had interests in France, including the vineyard that bears their name. When Erskine was six years old, his father died of tuberculosis, and his mother, despite displaying no signs of the disease at the time, was admitted to an isolation hospital to protect her children. She corresponded with Childers on a regular basis until she died of tuberculosis six years later, having not seen her children since. The five children were brought to Glendalough to live with the Bartons, their mother's uncle's household.
