
“An Adventure in 1914 is a true-life memoir as riveting as an Ernest Hemingway novel.”Midwest Book Review
The Journey
“The following night we had a dense fog and heard the fog horn of another vessel. The engine of our ship (the SS Canopic) was then stopped and many of the passengers were greatly alarmed, thinking that the other vessel might be a German cruiser….”

1914
The world can change fundamentally in a single day. It has done so many times. The world changed on September 11, 2001; it changed on December 7, 1941. Earlier in the twentieth century, the world was shaken to its foundations on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. Of course, it took longer than one day for World War I to erupt—it took a summer. My great-grandfather, Thomas Tileston Wells, was an eyewitness to that refulgent and transformative summer. An Adventure in 1914 is his testament .
At the Lido Palace Hotel
“On the way to Lake Garda we constantly passed trains full of soldiers and trains with cannons and other military supplies…
I was stopped by a man in a brown and rather dirty civilian suit who told me that the two other Russian spies had been caught and that all three of us would be shot that afternoon.”
Enjoy more books by Christopher Kelly
In his own words – listen to our interview with the author on uncovering this never before published manuscript of his family’s history.
“It is by far my most personal book.”