'Larson is an old hand at treating nonfiction like high drama.He knows how to pick details that have maximum soapy potential and then churn them down until they foam has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail.'

'Larson is one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction.a resourceful reporter and a subtle stylist who understands the tricky art of Edward Scissorhands-ing narrative strands into a pleasing story.An entertaining book about a great subject, and it will do much to make this seismic event resonate for new generations of readers.' Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, LibraryReads, Indigo

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, St.

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.įinalist for the Washington State Book Award

Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small-hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more-all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”-the fastest liner then in service-and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. “Both terrifying and enthralling.”- Entertainment Weekly From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania.

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