The Restless Wave: A Novel of the United States Navy

From the New York Times-bestselling former NATO commander comes a riveting historical novel that charts the coming-of-age of a gifted but immature young Naval officer as he is tested in the crucible of World War 2 in the Pacific

Scott Bradley James arrives in Annapolis, MD as a plebe in the class of 1941 without a terribly good idea why he wants to be a Naval officer, other than that his father was a sailor in his day, an enlisted man, and Scott grew up on the water in the Florida Keys. And he wants to see the world, whatever that means.

At Annapolis, Scott becomes fast friends with his roommate, Sean Kelley, an Irish Catholic kid from Boston who’s set on becoming a Marine officer. After running the gauntlet at the Academy and surviving scrapes of their own making, Scott and Sean both fetch up at Pearl Harbor, the giant US Naval base, in the spring of 1941. War is brewing, and their class has graduated early. They have been sent to battle stations.

Admiral James Stavridis is an acclaimed novelist, a decorated military leader, and a great student of military history, and he draws on all of these dimensions to capture the experience of a single American naval officer and his intimate circle as they are storm-tossed by the bloody first years of the Second World War. Scott Bradley James, like many young men, has the vices of his virtues: he’s valorous but somewhat self-absorbed, keenly ambitious but oblivious to ambition’s costs. He’s a talented young officer, but he has a lot to learn. And war will have a lot to teach him.

In the tradition of Patrick O’Brien’s classic Aubrey-Maturin novels, which offer a panorama of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars from an intimate human perspective, The Restless Wave offers a gripping account of the United States Navy’s astonishing progress through the first three years of the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor through to Midway, Guadalcanal and the Coral Sea. This is a story of character under pressure in the harshest of proving grounds; it’s also a story of romance during war and its fragility, and of betrayal, and human weakness.

The Restless Wave is a novel of military history written with careful fidelity to the truths of war, both the specific tactical and strategic realities and the larger dimensions of character and purpose that have made sea stories like this essential to the art of storytelling at least as far back as Odysseus. The novel is animated by a spirit both of patriotism and of truth-telling, written by an American veteran who believes the two are one and the same, and that much of what shaped our nation came from the Second World War.