The Lusitania Lives, And Dies, Again!

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The wake of the Lusitania

I’m pleased to say that my new book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, is about to launch. I feel I should whack it with a bottle of champagne, since it is, after all, about a ship. The book becomes available officially on March 10, the same day I will set out on a month-long book tour that will take me to cities and towns throughout America. (Please see my Events page for dates and places.)

Today someone asked me via Facebook what I do to celebrate the completion of a book. Oddly enough, that’s the first time in my 20 or so years of book-writing that anyone’s asked me that question. I don’t celebrate. In part, this is because the endpoint is sometimes hard to determine. A book is a living thing. A writer can tinker with it even in the final phases of proof-reading, and then, when the book hits the printing press, there is so much else that needs to be done to assure that it finds a happy home in the marketplace. And this is one area in which my publisher, Crown, really excels. The book will be everywhere.

There’s even a contest, created by Crown and several partners. The winner gets two tickets (and of course a signed copy of Dead Wake, the real prize! Um. Well….) As I was saying, the winner gets two tickets to sail aboard Cunard’s Queen  Victoria in May when it makes a voyage to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking. Here are details:

Anyway, I’m delighted the book will soon be on its way into stores and onto Kindles and Nooks and into tablets and iPhones and into libraries and, yes, onto ships. Though I do not necessarily recommend that you read Dead Wake if you happen to be on a liner in the middle of the Atlantic.  I recently did a crossing on the Queen Mary 2, and found myself trying to imagine what it must have been like to watch a torpedo come racing across a dead-calm sea right towards me. This is why ships have bars.

Cheers, and enjoy!


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Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, which examines how Winston Churchill and his “Secret Circle” went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Erik’s The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks, for a feature film. He recently published an audio-original ghost story, No One Goes Alone, which has been optioned by Netflix. Erik lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters.

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