THREE MORE NOVELS ABOUT DISASTER AT SEA

Every Man for Himself Beryl Bainbridge (1996) BBainbridge’s charactteristically idiosynccratic novel about tthe Titanic’s maiden vvoyage is narrated bby an (invented) nnephew of the AmericanA financier JP Morgan, cocooned in the privilege of the ship’s first- class quarters as it steams towards catastrophe. Unknown to themselves, the narrator and his fellow wealthy passengers are dancing on the edge of the abyss – and reality, in the shape of the iceberg, is about to intrude into their cosseted lives. Crabwalk Gunter Grass (2002) TThe last major work oof fiction by the Nobel PPrize-winning German aauthor, this compliccated and deviously ttold story has at its heart the sinking in 1945 of the German shiphi ththe WilhelmWilh Gustloff, then packed to the gunwales with troops and civilians fleeing the Red Army. More than 9,000 lives were lost. Grass’s narrative focuses on a journalist in the 1990s, whose mother survived the disaster and wishes him to write about it. The Lifeboat Charlotte Rogan (2012) TheT year is 1914, just aftera the outbreak of thet First World War, anda the ocean liner thet Empress Alexandrad has foundered iin the north Atlantic. TheT lifeboats are launched and Rogan’s gripping novel follows, day by day, events on one of them, seen through the eyes of her unreliable narrator Grace Winter, as she and her fellow passengers struggle to survive. This is a powerful tale of life and death in extreme circumstances.