A Sea without shores
Four non-fiction stories, exploring the islands of the Pacific War
Approaching Peleliu
Inspired by a lifelong fascination with the Pacific War, Chris Hulme has travelled extensively across the region, exploring landscapes, shipwrecks, and communities still marked by conflict.
Blending boots-on-the-ground exploration with vivid historical storytelling, his work recounts the struggles that shaped the fate of empires and the resilience of the people and places still coveted by competing superpowers to this day.
The first two books in the series will be released in autumn 2026, focused on the Philippines and the South Pacific, published by Pen & Sword. A third, about the Western Pacific, is coming in 2027. Chris is currently researching a fourth and final work, set in Japan.
His previous non-fiction book, Manslaughter United, chronicled a year with a prison football team of inmates serving life sentences and is published by Penguin Random House.
Dispatches
Chris speaks about the Pacific War and its lasting legacy at book festivals, military history events, and 1940s Weekends:
1940s Weekend - Middleport Pottery, Stoke
9/5/261940s Weekend - Heskin Hall, Chorley 30/5/26
Stepping Back to the 1940s, Wythenshawe Hall, Manchester 18/7/26
Rails To Victory, 1940s Weekend, Statfold Country Park, Tamworth 19/7/26
Yanks festival, Ashton Under Lyme, 2/8/26
1940s Weekender - Sleap Airfield, Shrewsbury 15/8/26
Ramsey 1940s Camp- Cambridge, 16/8/26
Battlefields of the South Pacific book launch, Northern Monk Refectory, Manchester 21/10/2
2027
Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life, Carlisle, 13/4/27
PACIFIC Gallery
A local fishing boat passes by during a B-17 wreck diving week in the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea
Forest path on the way to Bloody Nose Ridge, Peleliu
A wrecked Bell P-400 Airacobra Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
The author, exploring the wreck of USS Emmons. (Image courtesy of English Empire Divers, Okinawa. © 2026 Richard Sparrow. All rights reserved)
Bombed out American barracks, Corregidor, Philippines
Wrecked Japanese crane, Rabaul, New Britain
Hacksaw Ridge, Okinawa, today
Banzai Cliff, Marpi Point, Saipan
BACKGROUND
Chris Hulme has written for The Times, The FT, The Guardian, along with a variety of newspapers around the world, including The Australian, The New Zealand Herald and The South China Morning Post. He spent three years as a Contributing Editor at British GQ Magazine. He lives in Manchester but is originally from Devon.
For his books about the Pacific, he has retraced the two major fronts of the 1941-1945 conflict. One runs north from Queensland, Australia, through Guadalcanal and New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, and on to Luzon and Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, via Papua New Guinea's Port Moresby, Milne Bay and Rabaul. The other runs west across the Pacific, through Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Peleliu, before reaching Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. His travels ended on mainland Japan, in Tokyo, Kure, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His interests range from military history and all things Japanese to scuba diving and man-made objects on the sea floor - which may explain the half-finished maritime adventure novel that's been sitting in his desk drawer for over twenty years.
The real life story of a prison football team made up of life sentences inmates. They played in a local league, home games only.
“An extraordinary book. Buy it, read it, treasure it” The Sunday Times
“Porridge meets Escape to Victory - a witty, moving and wholly original read’ Daily Mirror
An anthology with GQ’s sports writing, with two chapters contributed by Chris Hulme
CONTACT
Hello/Kumusta/Halo Olketa/Håfa Adai/Konnichiwa
chrishulmewrites@gmail.com