“Do you really think all lives are worth saving?” Inspired partly by his worn and tattered childhood Ladybird book,The Life-Boat Men, Dominic Gregory plucked up the courage to volunteer at his local RNLI lifeboat station after moving to Dungeness, Kent. It is the starting point for this extraordinary, at times harrowing, always quietly staggering debut memoir of being part of a lifeboat crew, composed almost entirely of volunteers. Many of them from families who have crewed the lifeboat for generations, they give up their time, livelihoods and dry-land safety to rescue anyone in distress at sea. In recent years, those in distress have included scores of desperate people, risking it all to reach our southern shores in inflatable dinghies, which quickly become death traps. The searing passages where Gregory describes responding to such mayday calls brought home the horror of the so-called “small boats crisis” like nothing else I have read. Rescuing those in peril at sea is a legal requirement but also, Gregory shows, a moral imperative. This book bottles the extraordinary heroism of those we rely on to do it.