In the summer of 1914, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Grace elopes to London with Henry Winter, hoping to escape the disapproval of his wealthy family. When the elegant ocean liner carrying them home to America suffers a mysterious explosion, Henry sacrifices his own safety and secures Grace a seat in a lifeboat, which its occupants quickly realize is over capacity. As supplies dwindle and the weather deteriorates, it becomes increasingly apparent that for any to live, some must die.

The castaways scheme and battle, caught up in a vicious power struggle between a ruthless but experienced sailor and an enigmatic matron with surprising powers of persuasion. Grace, who has made her way in the world by seizing every possible advantage, knows that choosing a side will seal her fate. As she recollects the unorthodox way she and Henry met and considers the new life of privilege she thought she’d found, she must now decide: Will she pay any price to keep it?

The Lifeboat was nominated for the Guardian first book award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Goldsboro Books and Historical Writers Association debut historical fiction prize. It was included on The Huffington Post’s 2015 list of “21 books from the last 5 years that every woman should read,” is in development as a motion picture starring Anne Hathaway, and has been translated into 26 languages.

Advance Praise

“The Lifeboat traps the reader in a story that is exciting at the literal level and brutally moving at the existential. I read it in one go.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of New York Times bestseller Room

“Charlotte Rogan uses a deceptively simple narrative of shipwreck and survival to explore our all-too-human capacity for self-deception.”
—JM Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Waiting for the Barbarians

“What a splendid book. It rivets the reader’s attention, and at the same time it seethes with layered ambiguity.”
—Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall

“The Lifeboat is a spellbinding and beautifully written novel, one that will keep readers turning pages late into the night.”
—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“The Lifeboat is a richly rewarding novel, psychologically acute and morally complex. It can and should be read on many levels, but it is first and foremost a harrowing tale of survival.”
—Valerie Martin, winner of the Orange Prize for Property

Excerpt from The Lifeboat

The below text from The Lifeboat is also available for download as a PDF here.

Today I shocked the lawyers, and it surprised me, the effect I could have on them. A thunderstorm arose as we were leaving the court for lunch. They dashed for cover under the awning of a nearby shop to save their suits from getting wet while I stood in the street and opened my mouth to it, transported back and seeing again that other rain as it came at us in gray sheets. I had lived through that downpour, but the moment in the street was my first notion that I could live it again, that I could be immersed in it, that it could again be the tenth day in the lifeboat, when it began to rain.

The rain had been cold, but we welcomed it. At first it had been no more than a teasing mist, but as the day progressed, it began to come down in earnest. We held our faces up to it, mouths open, drenching our swollen tongues. Mary Ann could not or would not part her lips, either to drink or to speak. She was a woman of my age. Hannah, who was only a little older, slapped her hard and said, “Open your mouth, or I’ll open it for you!” Then she grabbed Mary Ann and pinched her nostrils until she was forced to gasp for air. The two of them sat for a long time in a sort of violent embrace while Hannah held Mary Ann’s jaws open, allowing the gray and saving rain to enter her, drop by drop.

“Come, come!” said Mr. Reichmann, who is the head of the little band of lawyers hired by my mother-in-law, not because she cares one jot about what happens to me, but because she thinks it will reflect badly on the family if I am convicted. Mr. Reichmann and his associates were calling to me from the sidewalk, but I pretended not to hear them. It made them very angry not to be heard or, rather, not to be heeded, which is a different and far more insulting thing, I imagine, to those used to speaking from podiums, to those who regularly have the attention of judges and juries and people sworn to truth or silence and whose freedom hangs on the particular truths they choose to tell. When I finally wrenched myself away and joined them, shivering and drenched to the bone but smiling to myself, glad to have rediscovered the small freedom of my imagination, they asked, “What kind of trick was that? Whatever were you doing, Grace? Have you gone mad?”

Mr. Glover, who is the nicest of the three, put his coat around my dripping shoulders, but soon the fine silk lining was soaked through and probably ruined, and while I was touched Mr. Glover had offered his coat, I would much rather it had been the coat of the handsome, heavyset William Reichmann that had been ruined in the rain.

“I was thirsty,” I said, and I was thirsty still.

Reviews

“Impressive, harrowing first novel…Rogan writes viscerally about the desperate condition of the castaway…But it’s her portrait of Grace, who is by turns astute, conniving, comic and affecting, that drives the book.”
—New York Times

“By some way the most gripping debut of 2012 I’ve read.”
— The Sunday Times

“Rogan has written a layered and provocative tale of survival and impossible decisions. But her biggest achievement is the disarmingly demure yet fiercely shrewd Grace, a narrator as fascinating and unreliable as they come.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A strangely wonderful book, like Moby Dick retold by Dorothy L. Sayers.”
—The Spectator

“Rogan has written an eerie, powerful debut you’ll want to race through, but try to resist the urge. A slower read reveals a psychological depth that’ll leave you thinking.”
—People

“A daring, imaginative tour de force.”
—The Independent

“Other novels have examined the conscience and guilt of a survivor among the dead, but few tales are as thoughtful and compelling as this.”
—Washington Post

“An enthralling story of survival at sea…One hell of a debut.”
—The New York Review of Books

Honors and Lists

Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for spring, 2012
Waterstones 11 Choice for 2012
Long-listed for the Guardian first book award
Nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Short-listed for the Goldsboro Books/Historical Writers Association debut historical fiction prize
A New York Times bestseller
The Huffington Post, 2015: 21 Books From The Last 5 Years That Every Woman Should Read
The Guardian: Books of the year for 2012
The Globe and Mail: Top 29 picks for international fiction of 2012
BookPage: Best books of 2012
The Independent: Books of the Year 2012: Literary fiction
NPR: Best Books of 2012: The Complete List
The Wall Street Journal asks 50 “friends” to select their favorite reads of 2012; Hilary Mantel chooses The Lifeboat
The San Francisco Chronicle: Best Books of 2012: 100 recommended books
The Guardian: Your books of the year–Guardian readers pick their favorite books of 2012
denverpost.com: 2012’s memorable books
The Globe and Mail: 45 notable book-lovers share their best reads of the year
Salt Lake County Library System: Nominated for reader’s choice awards

Reading Guide for The Lifeboat

The below text from The Lifeboat is also available for download as a PDF here.

WARNING: Some questions contain SPOILERS.

• In disaster situations, is it right to save women and children first? What moral justifications exist for your answer?
• Discuss the thought experiment referred to in Grace’s trial, also known as “The Plank of Carneades.” Is either the first or second swimmer to reach the plank justified in pushing the other swimmer away?
• What do you think of the concept of necessity as a justification for behavior that would not be condoned in ordinary circumstances?
• If you were to ask Grace what qualities she looks for in a friend, what would she say? What would the truth be?
• Which characters, in your opinion, hold the moral high ground?
• Seventeenth-century political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke postulated that humankind started off in a state of nature and gradually gave up certain freedoms in return for security, an exchange sometimes called the social contract. How does the lifeboat approximate a state of nature? Does survival in such a state require giving up personal freedom and autonomy?
• Some modern writers assert that the advances in opportunities for women have been predicated on the requirement that women become more like men. Do you agree with this?
• Are people more likely to revert to traditional male/female roles in crisis situations? What traditional male/female traits might help a person survive?
• Author Warren Farrell, who writes about gender issues, has said: “Men’s weakness is their façade of strength; women’s strength is their façade of weakness.” Does this hold true for the characters in The Lifeboat?

• In his book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, Nathaniel Philbrick argues that an “authoritarian” leadership style is useful in the early stages of a disaster, but a “social” style becomes more important over time. Does this dynamic fully explain the power struggle in Lifeboat 14 or were other forces at work?
• Does power always involve the threat of coercion? Besides violence, what forms of power influence the characters in The Lifeboat?
• The first thing a person says is often more honest than later explanations. Are there instances in the book where a character’s early words are a clue to assessing the truth of a particular situation or incident?
• Do you think Mr. Hardie stole or helped to steal anything from the sinking Empress Alexandra? Would this have been wrong, given that any valuables were destined to be lost forever?
• Should Grace have been acquitted of Mr. Hardie’s murder?
• Comment on the use of storytelling in the novel. Does your answer shed any light on Grace’s own story?

More Editions

Swedish Edition

The post The Lifeboat appeared first on Charlotte Rogan's Official Author Website.

“I was born in Mount Kisco, New York, moved every few years, easily absorbed the primary lesson of my early education, which was to tell people what they wanted to hear, was exposed to many mystifying church-based institutions but also to the majesty of nature, attended a strange and repressive boarding school, and found myself at Princeton University at the tail end of the Vietnam War.

At Princeton, I majored in architecture, a discipline that bridged the reliable world of formula and fact with a creative realm that left me exhilarated and unsure. I belonged to one of the first classes to admit women and was occasionally called on to give ‘the female point of view.’ This always left me wondering if I was letting my half of humanity down, but it was also my first inkling that opinions might be gender based.

After several semesters at various graduate schools, I took a job in the engineering department of a large construction firm in New York City. I loved to visit the upper floors of the skyscrapers I worked on, before the walls were up, when the building was nothing but a steel skeleton with concrete floors. Sometimes writing gives me the same feeling that there is nothing between me and the drop but air.

I write to ask questions, not to answer them. Writing is also my attempt at reverence—for the natural world, for the gift of language, and for the thing in people that will sometimes do the right thing in spite of the consequences to themselves and in spite of the cacophony of voices claiming privileged insight into what the right thing is.

I did not begin writing until my mid-thirties and had tucked four novels away in a drawer before The Lifeboat was published in 2012. After many years in Dallas and a year in South Africa, I now live in Westport, Connecticut.”

—Charlotte Rogan

Bookshelf

Charlotte’s Bookshelf is available for download as a PDF here.

This is a list of the most dog-eared books on my shelf. I have included books that astonished me, books that inspired me, and books that taught me how to write.

Charlotte Rogan on The Lifeboat

Contact

Publicity and Media: Carrie Neill
Carrie.Neill@hbgusa.com
212-364-1437

UK Publicity and Media: Zoe Hood
Zoe.Hood@littlebrown.co.uk
+44 (20) 7911 8070

Literary Agent: David McCormick
McCormick Literary
37 West 20^th Street, #606
New York, NY 10011
212-691-9726

The post About the Author appeared first on Charlotte Rogan's Official Author Website.

For Maggie Rayburn—wife, mother, and long-time secretary at a munitions plant—life is pleasant, predictable, and, she assumes, secure. But when she finds proof of a high-level cover-up on her boss’s desk, she impulsively takes it, an act that turns her world, and her worldview, upside down. Propelled by a desire to do good—and also by a newfound taste for excitement—Maggie starts to see injustice everywhere. Soon her bottom drawer is filled with what she calls “evidence,” her small town has turned against her, and she must decide how far she will go for the truth.

For Penn Sinclair—Army Captain, Ivy League graduate, and reluctant heir to his family’s fortune—a hasty decision has disastrous results. Home from Iraq and eager to atone, he reunites with three survivors to expose the truth about the war. They launch a website that soon has people talking, but the more they expose, the cloudier their mission becomes.

Now and Again is a blazingly original novel about the interconnectedness of lives, the limits of knowledge, and the consequences of doing the right thing.

Advance praise for Now & Again

“Now and Again is breathtaking in its scope and insight. This is America from the ground up, full of ordinary people trying to make sense of their lives, driven by that brand of frontier idealism that might yet be our last best hope.”
—Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution and I Am No One.

“With consummate command of narrative, Charlotte Rogan nimbly brings together whistleblowers and soldiers in a damning—and page-turning—critique of America’s military-industrial complex and its massive amount of collateral damage. It’s the novel we deserve for the war we didn’t.”
— Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine and Kapitoil

Excerpt from Now & Again

Maggie Rayburn had just come from eating birthday cake in the employees’ lunchroom when a document sitting in plain sight on her boss’s desk caught her eye. It was one o’clock, and a shaft of late-winter sun was stabbing through the plate-glass window behind the desk, blinding her enough so that at first she wasn’t sure exactly what was signified by the thick red border on the document’s cover or by the stern capital letters or the string of acronyms and slashes. Curiosity—was it a useful trait or a dangerous one? But who isn’t curious, she thought as she lifted the cover and peered inside: Discredit the doctors, she read. Flood the system with contradictory reports.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, causing a shiver to prickle her neck. She glanced out the window and cocked her head to listen. It was getting brighter out—or no, it wasn’t really, but now and then a band of light cut through the pervasive cloud cover and illuminated the stretch of farmland she had been looking at for what seemed like a thousand years. It was gray and frozen now, but in a few more months it would burst with life, aided by the antlike tractors that crawled along the corn rows and the spindly wheeled irrigation contraption and, a few months later, the big green harvesting machines. And in the distance…

But she didn’t have time to think about the distance, where the corn gave way to wheat and where a phalanx of oil rigs were drilling into the sub-shelf of the Arkoma Basin, and beyond the oil rigs, Oklahoma City, and beyond that…

Beyond that, an entire world she had never seen.

The footsteps were coming closer, pausing—surely they belonged to Mr. Winslow, who would have finished up his meeting with the army brass by now—and anyway, there was never time. There were documents to be typed and filed, telephones to be answered, an outfit to be chosen for the special birthday dinner Lyle was planning for her—in secret, he thought, but Lyle was an open book. The more furtive his movements, the easier it was to guess what he was up to. All of the hours in the day were spoken for!

Unless she made time. Unless she announced: “Thursday evening you boys are on your own” and went to get her nails done or meet up with True and Misty for a girls’ night out.

But today something was different. Whatever it was caused Maggie’s heart to clench with a dangerous possibility, and before she knew what she was doing, the document was in her hands, and then it was tucked up inside the baggy sweater Lyle and Will had given her that morning for her birthday—Lyle, who had no fashion sense! Will, who wanted her to be presentable, but not the kind of mother his friends eyed from under the brims of their baseball caps. Where had the years gone? She might as well slap a used-up mother sign on her forehead if she was going to wear a sweater like that.

But as she stood in a stray shaft of February sunlight, watching the distant oil rigs pump their greasy dollars out of the ground, she wondered if certain seemingly indelible aspects of her life and personality might change. If Lyle might become her accomplice in whatever lay in wait for her as the earth made its lonely way around the sun and Will spun off into ever-farther orbits and she took another step along the Path to Becoming, which was something she had read about in a magazine she had bought herself as a birthday treat just, coincidentally, the day before.

Reviews for Now & Again

“In this stunning novel…seemingly unrelated story threads are ingeniously woven into an explosive whole.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Sprawling and vibrant”
—The Washington Post

“Rogan’s new novel takes place on land, but readers will be delighted to know that it is no less exciting than her first.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

“Dazzling layering of different people and different stories and of the leaps their minds make as they learn to open their eyes”
—The Sunday Times

“Rogan’s debut novel, The Lifeboat, was a suspenseful, psychological survival story, and her new novel is just as harrowing, and even more complex.”
—The National Book Review

“All the ingredients of a tense thriller, but with a domestic slant that got my heart involved.”
—Red Magazine

“As in The Lifeboat, Rogan has an excellent grip of the necessary satisfactions of plot, and of both structure and character… She confidently and swiftly builds a complex, three-dimensional lattice of allegiance and affect that stretches from the US to Iraq.”
—The Guardian

Honors and Lists

Parade Magazine: 10 Books Mom Will Love
Red Magazine: Best Books to Read This May
San Diego Magazine: 6 Books to Read in April
B&N Reads: April’s Best New Fiction
DuJour: On the Shelf: What to Read This April
Hello Giggles: 12 new books by women we can’t wait to read this April
The Huffington Post: The Most Anticipated Books For 2016
Literary Hub: The Buzz Books Spring/Summer Preview
The Millions: Most Anticipated: The Great 2016 Book Preview
Brooklyn Magazine: 101 Books to Read This Year
Bookpage: 2016 Preview Selection

Reading Group Guide for Now and Again

The below text from The Lifeboat is also available for download as a PDF here.

WARNING: Some questions contain SPOILERS.

1. Is Now and Again a novel about war or is it mostly about something else?
2. The story is told from 12 different points of view. Why do you think the author made this stylistic choice?
3. Lyle reads in How To Win Friends And Influence People that a person usually has two reasons for doing something: one that sounds good and the real one.
   1. Do you agree with this, or is it overly cynical?
   2. Why would Maggie say she took the top-secret document from her boss’s desk? Is this the real reason?
   3. Do the soldiers start the website mostly for selfish reasons or mostly for altruistic ones? What does this say about human motivation?
4. The people of Red Bud depend on the munitions plant and the prison for their jobs. Are better lives for some people purchased at the expense of worse lives for others? If so, can anything be done about it?
5. Were the various characters qualified to make some of the decisions they made? If not, what would have qualified them—did they need more information or something else? What does this say about democracy? About government secrecy? How much information does a person need before he or she can act?
6. Maggie leaves home to make a difference in the larger world. Captain Sinclair lets his desire to build a school affect his decision about the convoy.
   1. Where does a person’s first duty lie?
   2. Can the concept of duty be used to stop people from trying to make a difference in the world?
7. The Professor tells Sinclair that “man is warlike.”
   1. Do you agree, and what does your answer say about the possibility of world peace?
   2. Colonel Falwell says, “If there’s nothing worth fighting for, there’s nothing worth living for either.” Do you agree with this statement, and does it change your answer to the question above?
8. Chapter 12.1 describes Penn’s second meeting with the professor, who declares there is only one meaningful philosophical question, but he is interrupted before he can say what it is. How do you think the professor meant to complete this sentence: “It is whether it is possible to be both moral and…”
9. The novel is told in two parallel plot lines.
   1. Why did the author keep the two stories mostly separate?
   2. Only Dolly and Will overlap in both stories. Why?
10. How is the town of Red Bud like the neighborhood in Trenton where the soldiers settle? How is it different? Does small town life empower or repress its citizens, or is it some combination of the two?
11. While the soldiers are searching for truth, Maggie sets off on a quest for justice. Tula wants to make a difference based on her belief in purity.
    1. Are big ideals within our reach, or is this sort of quest hopelessly Quixotic? What does this say about idealism?
    2. What does Sandra Day O’Connor symbolize?
    3. How do Tula’s ideas about purity change over the course of the book?
12. What does the novel say about the American dream? Is it likely that characters like Joe Kelly and Tula Santos can escape the circumstances of their birth?
13. What do the windows in the prison basement symbolize? What about the broken ladders that lead to them?
14. What did Louise represent for the captain? Why does he decide to go back to Iraq?
15. What role does journalism play in the book? How does the chorus of voices at the beginning of each chapter fit with this?
16. The last chapter acts as a sort of epilogue to the book.
    1. What do you think happened to Will? Was he at the mercy of forces beyond his control or was he at least partly in control of his fate?
    2. What does the ending say about history?

More Editions

UK Edition

Swedish Edition

The post Now and Again appeared first on Charlotte Rogan's Official Author Website.

See below for remaining February events.

The post Events for Spring 2017 appeared first on Charlotte Rogan's Official Author Website.

Wednesday, September 28, 6:30 PM – Chanhassen Public Library, Kerber Blvd, Chanhassen, MN

Thursday, October 27, 7:30 PM – Bedford Free Library, 32 Village Green, Bedford, NY

Wednesday, November 30, lunchtime event with Anne Korkeakivi, author of Shining Sea and An Unexpected Guest – Hickory Stick Bookshop, 2 Green Hill Rd, Washington Depot, CT: Check back later for details

Sunday, January 29, 4:00 PM – Pequot Library, 720 Pequot Ave, Southport, CT

Sunday, February 26, 2:00-4:00 PM – Connecticut Authors Reading Series at the C.H. Booth Library in Newtown, CT

The post Events for Fall & Winter 2016-17 appeared first on Charlotte Rogan's Official Author Website.

Sat, June 11, 2:15 PM – Printers Row Lit Fest, Hotel Blake, Shedd Room, 500 S. Dearborn St, Chicago, IL: In conversation with Adam Haslett and Charles Finch.

Saturday, June 18, 3:00 PM – The Wonder of Words Festival, Main Stage, Des Moines, Iowa.

Tuesday, July 5, 7:00 PM – Bookcourt, 163 Court St, Brooklyn, NY: I will be talking with Patrick Flanery about his new book, I Am No One.

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Wednesday, April 6, 5:30 PM – Brown Bookstore, 244 Thayer St, Providence, RI

Thursday, April 7, 7:00 PM – Wellesley Books, 82 Central Street, Wellesley, MA

Sunday, April 10, 2:00 PM – Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd, Corte Madera, CA

Monday, April 11, 7:30 PM – Powell’s Books, 1005 W Burnside St, Portland, OR

Tuesday, April 12, 7:00 PM – Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA

Friday, April 15, 12:30 PM – Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way East, Bainbridge Island, WA

Monday, April 18, 6:00 PM – Tribeca Barnes & Noble, 97 Warren St, New York,  NY

Monday, April 25, 7:30 PM – The Wild Detectives, 314 W 8th St, Oak Cliff, Dallas, TX: If you haven’t yet discovered Dallas’s hip new cultural venue, now is your chance!

Tuesday, April 26, 6:30 PM – University Park Library, 8383 Preston Center Plaza #200, Dallas, TX

Wednesday, April 27, 7:00 PM – Anderson’s Bookshop, 123 W Jefferson Ave, Naperville, IL

Thursday, April 28, 7:00 PM – Left Bank Books, 399 North Euclid Ave, St. Louis, MO

Monday, May 2, 7:00 PM – Harry Bennett Library (branch of the Stamford Library), 115 Vine Rd, Stamford, CT

Tuesday, May 3, 7:00 PM – Westport Library, 20 Jesup Rd, Westport, CT

Wednesday, May 11, 12:00 Noon – Norwalk Library, 1 Belden Ave, Norwalk, CT

Thursday, May 12, 7:00 PM – Turn of the Corkscrew Books & Wine, 110 N Park Ave, Rockville Centre, NY

Wednesday, May 25, 6:00 PM – Savoy Bookshop & Café, 10 Canal St, Westerly, RI: Note that this is the new Westerly Rhode Island store affiliated with Bank Square Books in Mystic, CT. 

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