#1 New York Times Bestseller From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction
comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania 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. The
passengers were surprisingly at ease even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain
to be a war zone. For months German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. 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. Germany
however was determined to change the rules of the game and Walther Schwieger the captain of
Unterseeboot-20 was happy to oblige. Meanwhile an ultra-secret British intelligence unit
tracked Schwieger's U-boat but told no one. 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. 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. 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. 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.
