True Disasters

A raging wildfire burns thousands of homes. A violent earthquake creates a giant tsunami that destroys countless lives. A giant tornado wipes a small town off the map. Discover the true stories of people who survived these terrible disasters and lived to tell the tale in this book from the Fighting to Survive series.

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. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December fifth of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days.

When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in 100-mile-per-hour winds and record 90-foot seas during a savage storm in January 1998, her five crewmen are left to drift without a life raft in the freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can. One hundred fifty miles away, in Sitka, Alaska, an H-60 Jayhawk helicopter lifts off from America's most remote Coast Guard base in the hopes of tracking down an anonymous Mayday signal. A fisherman's worst nightmare has become a Coast Guard crew's desperate mission.

On the night of February 18, 1952, during one of the worst winter storms that New England has ever seen, two oil tankers just off the shore of Cape Cod were torn in half by the force of the storm. This middle-grade adaptation of an adult nonfiction book tells the story of the shipwreck and a harrowing Coast Guard rescue when four men in a tiny lifeboat overcame insurmountable odds and saved more than thirty stranded sailors.

Now eight months into a global blackout, the residents of Oak Hollow are trying to cope with the deep winter nights and a gnawing hunger from a food shortage. The struggle to survive can bring out the worst in anyone. A teenage friend of the Brannings has been found shot while hunting, and his slain deer is gone. Suspicions immediately fall on Mark Green, the son of a convicted murderer. Before he can prove his innocence, vigilantes force the sheriff to arrest him.

A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping true story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again. The inspiration for the Apple Original Film The Lost Bus, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera “A tour de force story of...

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

On December 3, 1999, the call crackled in to the men of the Worchester, Massachusetts Fire Department: a three-alarm warehouse blaze in a six-story windowless colossus of brick and mortar. What happened next, and how their lives and community were changed forever, offers an unprecedented look at these heroic men whose job it is to rush into burning buildings when everyone else just wants out.

The true story behind the events that inspired the major motion picture Only the Brave. A "unique and bracing" (Booklist) first-person account by the sole survivor of Arizona's disastrous 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which took the lives of 19 "hotshots" -- firefighters trained specifically to battle...

CAN THE STAR DARLINGS SAVE THEIR WORLD? Lots of strange things are going on at Starling Academy, and some of the girls are suspicious. As they begin investigating, they wonder if there’s any connection between Scarlet getting kicked out of the Star Darlings and Leona’s troubled mission. When...

When a forty-seven-foot sailboat disappears in the Gulf Stream in the throes of a disastrous storm, it leaves behind three weary passengers struggling to stay alive. This middle-grade adaptation of an adult nonfiction book tells the story of the four intrepid Coast Guardsmen who braved this ruthless storm in the hopes of saving them. A spellbinding tale of courage and survival from the author of The Finest Hours.

On the night of February 5th, 2004, twenty-six Chinese migrant workers stepped onto the cold sands of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, England — unaware that within hours, twenty-one of them would be dead. In this harrowing and powerful true crime account, Stu Armstrong exposes the dark underside of human trafficking and labour exploitation in modern Britain. Blending real events with immersive, character-driven fictionalisation, the story is told through the eyes of Ming, one of the survivors.

In this gripping narrative history, Al Roker from NBC’s Today and the Weather Channel vividly examines the deadliest natural disaster in American history—a haunting and inspiring tale of tragedy, heroism, and resilience that is full of lessons for today’s new age of extreme weather. On the...

During the height of the blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat, but was soon in as much trouble as the tanker. Then pilot boat captain Frank Quirk, hearing of the Coast Guard's troubles on his radio, decided to act.

The deadliest storm in modern history ripped Pakistan in two and led the world to the brink of nuclear war when American and Soviet forces converged in the Bay of Bengal In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a...

An immersive account of a commercial fishing disaster at sea whose repercussions haunt its survivors to this day, lauded by New York Times bestselling author Ron Suskind as “an honest and touching book, and a hell of a story.” In March of 1984, the commercial fishing boat Wind Blown left...

On the morning of July 3, 1994, a misreported forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado became one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. In this dramatic reconstruction of the disaster and its aftermath, John N. MacLean tells the heroic and cautionary story of nature at its most unforgiving.

For John and Laura Foster, what began as a fairy-tale honeymoon in 1857 aboard the steamship SS Vandervere quickly turns into a nightmare. A terrible hurricane strikes, and the grand ship begins to sink. Just before it goes under, a rescue ship appears on the horizon. But it only has room enough to save the women and children.

Join travel writer Angie Orth (@angieaway) on a journey of self-discovery as she empowers readers to buck expectations, take leaps of faith, and trust that God’s plan is better than anything we think we want for our lives. Angie Orth should have had at least 2.5 kids by now—everyone else...

Discover the true tales of daring people who survived through bitter cold, deadly storms, and other dangers with little food or other resources in this book from the Fighting to Survive series.