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    S.O.S.: A Short Story
    S.O.S.: A Short Story
    S.O.S.: A Short Story
    Ebook40 pages24 minutes

    S.O.S.: A Short Story

    By Agatha Christie

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Previously published in the print anthology The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories.

    One rainy night on the Wiltshire Downs, the Dinsmeads' evening meal is interrupted by a stranger. Mortimer Cleveland enters their lives when his car breaks down and he seeks shelter. Cleveland is a psychic researcher who immediately senses that something is wrong; he detects murder in the air. Can he save the victim before it is too late?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 10, 2013
    ISBN9780062300683
    S.O.S.: A Short Story
    Author

    Agatha Christie

    Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She died in 1976, after a prolific career spanning six decades.

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    Reviews for S.O.S.

    3.5/5

    168 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I felt like this novel was about life and happiness rather than death and despair, but that really depends on how you choose to focus on it. The preface poses an important question about the will to live and how we perceive life after experiencing death. I think Day was a great complement to Night and would recommend it to anybody that enjoyed Night.
    • 4/5
      I recall this novel being vivid; not refracted through memory or parable. The couple in the novel went to see the film adaptation of Brothers Karamzaov. That's odd to recall those detail after 18 years.
    • 4/5
      I felt like this novel was about life and happiness rather than death and despair, but that really depends on how you choose to focus on it. The preface poses an important question about the will to live and how we perceive life after experiencing death. I think Day was a great complement to Night and would recommend it to anybody that enjoyed Night.
    • 3/5
      Day was a dark exploration about the guilt that those who survived the Holocaust experience. It was a fictional account of a man who is hit by a cab and seriously wounded. While he is in the hospital, the reader finds out about his past and his present. This man seems to be existing but not truly capable of experiencing life. In the end, I am left with a lot of questions. Will he begin to live again? Will he truly allow another human to enter his life? Will he stay with Kathleen? Will his past continue to prevent his future?
    • 4/5
      You could tell Wiesel was definitely the author of this work, it didn't strike me with the raw emotions Night had. I know the content was completely different, but I couldn't connect with the characters in the same way. It was still well written and I'm glad I read it. Would read again. 4 out of 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      This short novel is powerful, at times harrowing. The writing is compressed, the tone conversational. One would not think the language capable of handling so many large themes--God, the Holocaust, Hell, Suffering, Love--that the author freights it with. Yet it is the very lightness of the language that buoys the subject matter. There is even a touch of humor, albeit of a very black gallows variety. The writing is deft. It possesses a wonderful contiguity, a narrative cohesion as the incidents unfold. It is Wiesel's second novel and a translation from the French. The narrator, a Holocaust survivor, is in wrenching pain, both physical and emotional. He cannot let go of the past with its many dead. At any other time he would probably be a morose and dull fellow, but when he steps off a curb in Times Square and is struck by a cab his painful emotional life is brought to the fore. The accident is a nasty one. This febrile, near-death experience reanimates his sense of personal loss. This is essentially a philosophical novel, but so nicely undergirded with action that the reader is never adrift in abstractions. Eliezer, the narrator, cannot let go of his anger and despair. He was raised with a strong belief in God which his experience in the camps has annihilated. Kathleen, raised in affluence in the US, is his lover who, like Eliezer, but for different reasons, cannot wrap her mind around "the event." Both are sufferers of what psychologists would call survivor guilt. Don't let this crude partial summary I'm providing here put you off. The writing is nuanced, beautiful, and to use a phrase by Anthony Burgess "almost unbearably moving." Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Deep, very and takes unexpected turns, down some dark alleys of the Second World War.
    • 4/5
      A strong - but very sad - ending of Wiesels trilogy (Night, Dawn, Day). A Holocaust-survivor reflects about his life as he is in the hospital trying to recover from a car-accident that nearly killed him. Three persons try to help him - a doctor, his fiance/lover/friend and a hungarian painter. And we get glimpses of his past experiences/memories/dreams. He reflects about life and death, the distant silent God, his inability to love, his desire to die, the emptiness of life - his soul died in the nazi-camps - is it at all possible for him to return to life and to love again? The question is a hard one, and by the end of the book there is mostly despair - the tears in the end...a lament? A turning point?
    • 4/5
      Could I have found meaning in my life as a survivor of the Holocaust? More and more I have to wonder. "The Accident" makes me wonder what I would need to live again after such horrors. Very moving.
    • 1/5
      I Didn't like his writing style to begin with in Night, yet it still was a good book. Then he tries fiction and really takes the cake with failure. I just didn't think Weisel really knew what to write when he put this book together. He tries to repeat lines to make it seem enforcing, but only comes off trying to make a another book with tons of filler. I know I use to write like him in 6th grade. He's not an author in my view, but a raconteur of past experiences. That is why this book fails in its attempt at provoking any kind of realism or manifest emotions.
    • 2/5
      The worst book in the trilogy. No need to rehash how much I disliked it, or its predecessor.He could have done better. However I plan to re-read it, eventually.

    Book preview

    S.O.S. - Agatha Christie

    Contents

    S.O.S.

    About the Author

    The Agatha Christie Collection

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    S.O.S.

    Ah!" said Mr. Dinsmead appreciatively.

    He stepped back and surveyed the round table with approval. The firelight gleamed on the coarse white tablecloth, the knives and forks, and the other table appointments.

    Is—is everything ready? asked Mrs. Dinsmead hesitatingly. She was a little faded woman, with a colourless face, meagre hair scraped back from her forehead, and a perpetually nervous manner.

    Everything’s ready, said her husband with a kind of ferocious geniality.

    He was a big man, with stooping shoulders, and a broad red face. He had little pig’s eyes that twinkled under his bushy brows, and a big jowl devoid of hair.

    Lemonade? suggested Mrs. Dinsmead, almost in a whisper.

    Her husband shook his head.

    Tea. Much better in every way. Look at the weather, streaming and blowing. A nice cup of hot tea is what’s needed for supper on an evening like this.

    He winked facetiously, then fell to surveying the table again.

    A good dish of eggs, cold corned beef, and bread and cheese. That’s my order for supper. So come along and get it ready, Mother. Charlotte’s in the kitchen waiting to give you a hand.

    Mrs. Dinsmead rose, carefully winding up the ball of her knitting.

    She’s grown a very good-looking girl, she murmured. Sweetly pretty, I say.

    Ah! said Mr. Dinsmead. The mortal image of her Ma! So go along with you, and don’t let’s waste any more time.

    He strolled about the room humming to himself for a minute or two. Once he approached the window and looked out.

    Wild weather, he murmured to himself. Not much likelihood of our having visitors tonight.

    Then he too left the room.

    About ten minutes

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