Great Disasters

A Best Book of 2025 from Chicago Review of Books For fans of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Great Disasters is a stirring debut novel about six young men coming of age, and the enduring friendships that make us who we are—even as our paths diverge. This is...

Two catastrophes. One unshakable truth: the moment humanity declares something invincible is the moment disaster starts writing its opening line. Great Disasters 2-in-1 brings together Dominic Haynes's gripping accounts of the Titanic and Chernobyl — two of history's most devastating reminders that confidence is not the same as safety.

The Breakfast Club meets Guardians of the Galaxy in this YA sci-fi adventure by debut author M. K. England. Hotshot pilot Nax Hall has a history of making poor life choices. So it’s not exactly a surprise when he’s kicked out of the elite Ellis Station Academy in less than twenty-four hours...

A comprehensive catalog of the most devastating and deadly events-natural or man-made-in human history. If you follow the news it can seem like injury, sickness, and death are now constant, inescapable occurrences that threaten us every second of every day. But such catastrophic events - as terrible and frightening as they are - have been happening for as long as mankind has walked the Earth.... and even before. From ancient volcanoes and floods to epidemics of cholera and smallpox to Hitler's mass killings in the 20th century, humanity's continued existence has always seemed perilous.

The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the...

Based on the sensational evidence of the U.S. Senate hearings, eyewitness accounts, and the results of the 1985 Woods Hole expedition that photographed the ship, this electrifying account vividly re-creates the Titanic's last desperate hours afloat and fully addresses the questions that have continued to haunt the the world’s most famous marine disaster.

Professor Connel Fullenkamp of Duke University guides listeners through four centuries of economic disasters - from tulip mania in the 1600s to the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Each of his 24 lectures covers a notable incident of financial misfortune or folly that is worthy of a Hollywood thriller.

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows. The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since...

Global warming...reversed. The energy crisis...over. The greatest problem on Earth...solved. Voltarian Royal Officer of the Fleet Jettero Heller has it all figured out. And he’s devised a daring and ingenious plan to make it all happen...if he lives to see the day. Saving the world is never easy, and for Heller, it turns out to be a tricky - and risky - business.

From renowned writer and travel journalist Gary Krist comes the never-before-told story of one of the worst rail disasters in U.S. history in which two trains full of people, trapped high in the Cascade Mountains, are hit by a devastating avalanche. In February 1910, a monstrous blizzard...

The riveting true story of one of Canada’s worst mining disasters, told in the voices of the men who survived it Foreword by Anne Murray They said it was the world’s deepest and most dangerous coal mine. That claim was probably correct. What is certain is that in October 1958, the Dominion...

“Hugh’s imaginative worlds and tales within them never fail to entertain!” —Andy Weir, New York Times bestselling author of Project Hail Mary The first original novel from author Hugh Howey in six years, Across the Sand takes us back to the world of Sand, to a far future many generations...

Narrated by the author: Experience the Southern California wildfires through Jacob Soboroff’s eyes—and voice. New York Times Bestseller and #1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller A "gripping, unshakeable firsthand account" (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from...

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at...

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation...

Five short stories that give glimpses into the lives of Griffin, Jorie, and the other characters from Second Nature.

Combining rich historical detail and a harrowing, pulse-pounding narrative, Close to Shore brilliantly re-creates the summer of 1916, when a rogue Great White shark attacked swimmers along the New Jersey shore, triggering mass hysteria and launching the most extensive shark hunt in history. In...

‘In sixteen hundred and sixty-six, London burned like rotten sticks.’ Left alone and homeless by the Great Plague, Sam struggled to survive. He was lucky to get a job working for the Giraud family. But Andre, the son of his boss, doesn't make life easy. Then a fire breaks out on Pudding Lane...

The next highly anticipated novella in the Searching For series, a romantic spin-off of the Marriage to a Billionaire series from New York Timesbestselling sensation Jennifer Probst. When Isabella MacKenzie tries to move on from her disastrous past, Officer William Devine is determined to show...

Carter Morelli had a plan when he left London: deliver the wildlife photographer and complete his secret mission. Except a lethal enemy has watched their every move. They tampered with the plane, leaving them stranded on a deserted island. And they kidnapped June Porter, the innocent photographer. In order to save her, Carter must confront the mysterious man in the jungle. Who is he? Savior or betrayer? He has no choice but to face the greatest enemy of all: the powerful feelings that draw him toward both June and the man in the jungle. Those feelings might kill them all.