The Wolf Odyssey
This story is about the tremendous impact that one lone audacious German warship, the Wolf, made on the people of many nations during the final two years of the First World War.
Disguised as an ordinary freighter, the Wolf undertook one of the most daring naval missions of modern times, destroying more than thirty ships and capturing over 400 men, women and children in one continuous fifteen-month cruise which traversed three of the world’s major oceans and took it from Germany, via South Africa to Australia, New Zealand, the south Pacific and back. During this time the Wolf maintained radio silence and never pulled into port, surviving on fuel and food it plundered from the ships it destroyed. Equipped with all the technological marvels of the time – wireless receivers, explosive mines, a seaplane, even movie cameras – the Wolf was an instrument of terror in a new age of mechanised warfare.
Over the course of her voyage the ship became something else entirely – a floating microcosm of the world, home to more than 700 people from a myriad of different nations and social backgrounds. These prisoners – merchant seamen from more than twenty nations, Allied military officers, British and 
Australian colonialists and their wives, American businessmen and Japanese government officials, Mauritian teenagers, Portugese soldiers, the elderly and the very young – were crammed together with the 350-strong German crew in such close quarters that rigid notions of race and class broke down.
The Wolf Odyssey is the true story of an epic journey of destruction in World War I. Peter Hohnen has been researching this subject for six years. His great uncle, Alexander Ross Ainsworth, a merchant navy engineer, spent nine months as a prisoner of war on the German raider ship known as ‘the Wolf’.
Peter is currently co-writing this book with Richard Guilliatt.
It will be published in late 2009 in Australia by Random House; in the UK by Transworld, and in the US and Canada by The Free Press.
Their literary agent is The Mary Cunnane Agency (www.cunnaneagency.com). Other publishers and film-makers should contact Mary Cunnane at mary@cunnaneagency.com