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 previous national bestsellers—The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm— which have collectively sold more than twelve million copies. His books have been published in nearly forty countries.

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