“This page-turning true-life adventure is filled with rich and riveting details and a timeless understanding of the things that matter most.”—Dashka Slater, author of The 57 Bus “Brilliantly told in verse, readers will love Ken Sparks.” —Patricia Reilly Giff, two-time Newbery Honor winner “Lyrical, terrifying, and even at times funny. A richly detailed account of a little-known event in World War II.” —Kirkus Reviews “Middle grade Titanic fans, here’s your next read.” —BCCB “An edge-of-your seat survival tale.” —School Library Journal (starred review) A Junior Library Guild Selection The 2019 Golden Kite Middle Grade Fiction Award Winner A 2019 ALSC Notable Children’s Book The 2019–2020 Lectio Book Award Winner The 2020–2021 Florida Sunshine State Young Readers Award List The 2020 Oklahoma Library Association’s Children’s Sequoyah Book Award Winner The Connecticut Book Award Winner In the tradition of The War That Saved My Life and Stella By Starlight, this poignant novel in verse based on true events tells the story of a boy’s harrowing experience on a lifeboat after surviving a torpedo attack during World War II. With Nazis bombing London every night, it’s time for thirteen-year-old Ken to escape. He suspects his stepmother is glad to see him go, but his dad says he’s one of the lucky ones—one of ninety boys and girls to ship out aboard the SS City of Benares to safety in Canada. Life aboard the luxury ship is grand—nine-course meals, new friends, and a life far from the bombs, rations, and his stepmum’s glare. And after five days at sea, the ship’s officers announce that they’re out of danger. They’re wrong. Late that night, an explosion hurls Ken from his bunk. They’ve been hit. Torpedoed! The Benares is sinking fast. Terrified, Ken scrambles aboard Lifeboat 12 with five other boys. Will they get away? Will they survive? Award-winning author Susan Hood brings this little-known World War II story to life in a riveting novel of courage, hope, and compassion. Based on true events and real people, Lifeboat 12 is about believing in one another, knowing that only by banding together will we have any chance to survive.

The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, and airline travel and Cold War paranoia had made the images of an ocean liner's distress--the air force dropping supplies in the dark, a freighter collecting survivors from lifeboats--seem like echoes of a bygone era. But Stilgoe, already a passionate reader and an aficionado of small-boat navigation, began to delve into accounts of other disasters at sea. What he found was a trunkful of hair-raising stories--of shipwreck, salvation, seamanship brilliant and inept, noble sacrifice, insanity, cannibalism, courage and cravenness, even scandal. In nonfiction accounts and in the works of Conrad, Melville, and Tomlinson, fear and survival animate and degrade human nature, in the microcosm of an open boat as in society at large. How lifeboats are made, rigged, and captained, Stilgoe discovered, and how accounts of their use or misuse are put down, says much about the culture and circumstances from which they are launched. In the hands of a skillful historian such as Stilgoe, the lifeboat becomes a symbol of human optimism, of engineering ingenuity, of bureaucratic regulation, of fear and frailty. Woven through Lifeboat are good old-fashioned yarns, thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Crabwalk by G nter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as The Perfect Storm and In the Heart of the Sea. But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.

The sinking of an ocean liner leaves a newly married woman battling for survival in this powerful debut novel. Grace Winter, 22, is both a newlywed and a widow. She is also on trial for her life. In the summer of 1914, the elegant ocean liner carrying her and her husband Henry across the Atlantic suffers a mysterious explosion. Setting aside his own safety, Henry secures Grace a place in a lifeboat, which the survivors quickly realize is over capacity. For any to live, some must die. As the castaways battle the elements, and each other, Grace recollects the unorthodox way she and Henry met, and the new life of privilege she thought she'd found. Will she pay any price to keep it? The Lifeboat is a page-turning novel of hard choices and survival, narrated by a woman as unforgettable and complex as the events she describes.

The book "The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism" is an exciting review of the history of sea travels from the earliest times to the XIX century. It includes the first mentions of sea travel, the history of shipbuilding, mentions the greatest men who pursued geographical discoveries like Columbus and his contemporaries, and the deeds of pirates like Sir Francis Drake. The author revises the history of the most significant shipwrecks and concludes with poetry dedicated to sea and ship travel. The author spent his life traveling on a steamship and collected numerous stories and illustrations of interesting distant places. The book is the culmination of his lifetime interest in sea, travel, history, and art.