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...

1915. A young British boy and his father take in a lost girl, who the villagers suspect may be German. May, 1915. Alfie and his fisherman father find a girl on an uninhabited island in the Scillies-- injured, thirsty, lost-- and with absolutely no memory of who she is, or how she came to be there. She can say only one word: Lucy. Is she a mermaid, the victim of a German U-boat, or even, as some islanders suggest, a German spy? Only one thing is for...

"Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, carrying millionaires and aristocrats, actresses and impresarios, writers and suffragettes - a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the Twentieth Century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old; yet an encounter with the machinery of the New World, in the form of a primitive German U-Boat, sent her - and her gilded passengers...