Singing in the Lifeboat

Chasing an alcoholic father around the UK - and attending nine different schools in the process - may not have been the best start to life for Ian Bain. But it certainly gave him a taste for adventure. By 23, the young Scot had sailed around the world a couple of times, risked jail as a big-time booze smuggler in India and worked as the Buenos Aires correspondent of The Economist. Then, after a decade as a journalist in London with some of Britain's biggest newspapers, life really got interesting.

Ian's own slide into drink and despair took him to the Arabian Gulf in the belief that living there would be dry in every sense. It wasn't. Fired twice by local newspapers, he checked himself into a Dubai psychiatric ward where he was shocked to see patients handcuffed to the water pipes and guards with batons. Not the kind of rehab he'd imagined.

Emerging sober but broke, Ian talked a benevolent bank manager into lending him just enough to start his own public relations company. The firm's birth pangs were both painful and comical and could have ended abruptly when Ian was threatened with deportation. But he built the business into one of the most successful PR consultancies in the Middle East with clients such as General Motors, Airbus, Samsung, Emirates Airline and the Government of Dubai.

Commercial success didn't curtail Ian's affection for adventure. Helping to smuggle an Arab rally driver across tightly controlled European borders was hardly conducive to a quiet life. Nor was narrowly avoiding capture as Saddam's forces moved to seize Kuwait airport. There were business risks too, like the gamble he took in resigning a million-dollar-a-year PR account.

Regardless of acclaim as a writer and PR strategist, Ian carried a secret shame through his long career: an entrenched belief rooted in his turbulent childhood that he wasn't - and never would be - good enough. It got to the point where he gave away large amounts of money because he felt he didn't deserve to have it, and failed to collect fees from clients for the same reason. Eventually, Ian gave up the business and the comfortable life in Dubai to focus on healing the deep emotional wounds of his early years. And there began another remarkable adventure.

SINGING IN THE LIFEBOAT is the poignant, often funny, and immensely readable story of a man searching for himself.