The Mourning Wave A Novel Of The Great Storm

Queen of the Waves is a historical fiction novel that ties together the tales of two dramatic events that shaped the upper Texas Gulf Coast: Galveston's Great Storm of 1900 and the "secret" hurricane that struck Galveston during WWII in 1943. Through the characters of Marie Covington and Woodrow Harris, the parallels drawn against the backdrop of two historical storms tell of a remarkable people. Where Marie faces the risk of losing everything in 1943, Woodrow is a man who has lost all a man can lose in 1900, but uses his painful story of survival to teach what it truly means to be resilient amid the storms of life.

A teenage boy keeps a diary of events during the devastating hurricane which struck Galveston, Texas, in 1900, and of the rescue operations that followed.

An award-winning journalist’s voyage into her family history and her quest to face the storms she encounters there. In August Gale, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barbara Walsh—who has interviewed killers, bad cops, and crooked politicians in the course of her career—faces the most challenging story of her lifetime: asking her father about his childhood pain. In the process, she takes us on two heartrending odysseys: one into a deadly Newfoundland hurricane and the lives of schooner fishermen who relied on God and the wind to carry them home; the other, into a squall stirred by a man with many secrets: a grandfather who remained a mystery until long after his death. Sixty-eight years after the hurricane that claimed several of her ancestors, Walsh searches for memories of the August gale and the grandfather who abandoned her dad as a young boy. Together, she and her father journey to Newfoundland to learn about the 1935 storm, and along the way her dad begins to talk about the man he cannot forgive. As she recreates the scenes of the violent hurricane and a small boy's tender past, she holds onto a hidden desire: to heal her father and redeem the grandfather she has never met.

A bucolic resort setting -- the summer colony and locals are caught in the path of a sudden and devastating hurricane in this brilliant and prophetic fiction that is a warning of storms to come. “For those few who still remember, the images are seared into their brains: the corpses floating down Main Street; the boats that drifted into the living rooms of flooded houses; the dead dogs and featherless chickens; the muck and fish stink; the moonscape of flattened houses; the residue of the last great hurricane to hit Long Island, the storm of 1938. “ - The New York Times This is a story of that day – a day that began much like any other day at the ragtag end of the summer season on the eastern end of Long Island – better known as The Hamptons. The storm came without warning landing at three in the afternoon bringing with it unprecedented wind and rain and waves so high and powerful they were recorded on seismographs 5000 miles away in Alaska. But A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER is not just a hurricane novel. The storm is a framing device for an historical tableau vivant of this near mythical place – The Hamptons – brought to life via the stories of townspeople, the wealthy summer colony, the fishing folk and the art crowd. Written by a natural tale-spinner and masterful portraitist of character and place, it does have one wild, furious storm at its center – an historic tempest that wreaked havoc on the little towns and villages that line the ocean front of the South Fork of Long Island. Could it happen again? Yes - it will almost certainly happen again and no matter how many moguls build seaside monuments defying the odds, another hurricane like 1938 will surely be the deadliest in American history.

The women in an Arctic village must survive a sinister threat after all the men are wiped out by a catastrophic storm in this "gripping novel inspired by a real-life witch hunt. . . . Beautiful and chilling" (Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe). When the women take over, is it sorcery or power? Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster. For the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer—which they never did while the men were alive. But the foundation of this new feminine frontier begins to crack with the arrival of Absalom Cornet, a man sent from Scotland to root out alleged witchcraft. Cornet brings with him the threat of danger—and a pretty, young Norwegian wife named Ursa. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. "The Mercies has a pull as sure as the tide. It totally swept me away to Vardø, where grief struck islanders stand tall in the shadow of religious persecution and witch burnings. It's a beautifully intimate story of friendship, love and hope. A haunting ode to self-reliant and quietly defiant women." (Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of Shuggie Bain)