Lively, Penelope "The Mozambique Channel."

An imaginative and infinitely sad World War 2 tale from a collection of eight short stories linked together as a novel. (The author uses incidents in her own life to imagine what might have happened if at certain times she or others had made different decisions, or if chance had moved in another direction). It’s June 1942 and as Rommel’s German armies advance across North Africa and come within 70 miles of Alexandria, English noncombatant dependents (chiefly women and children) prepare to flee Egypt, some to Palestine and others to South Africa. Lively’s chief character in this short story is a young English governess who, along with her employer and the young girl in her charge, take passage with other expatriates aboard a converted liner bound for the safety of Cape Town. As the relatively uneventful two week voyage draws to a conclusion, the ship is torpedoed at night by a Japanese submarine in the Mozambique Channel (which separates the island of Mozambique from the African continent) and sinks, with great loss of life. As The Times Literary Supplement review of Aug. 5, 2005 notes, “The novelist ... captures, through the eyes of a prim, limited but warm-hearted young woman, the hierarchy of expatriate and English life, with a teasing evocation of attitudes towards children, courting and marriage among different classes.” Lively’s depiction of shipboard life is particularly fine, as are her descriptions of ports visited (Aden and Mombasa) during the course of the ill-fated voyage.