The Last Hours of Titanic

Belfast, March 1910. Tom Kerrigan, a journeyman joiner at Harland & Wolff, walks into the Howard Street registry to marry the midwife who delivers other people's children. Two years later, he stands on a ship he helped build and watches a wave he saw coming roll the planks under his boots. The Last Hours of Titanic is the story of one ship, one night, and three marriages. A Boston financier whose Latinate qualifying clauses fail him at last, and his Lancashire-born wife who answers him in monosyllables and means them.
A Belfast joiner who reads a sinking ship the way another man reads a badly hung door, and the midwife he married who reads bodies the way other women read faces. A Maronite stonemason from a Bekaa village who calls for the Abouna in his grandmother's pronunciation when his hands stop working, and the bookkeeper-bride who walks every deck of the Carpathia asking for his name in three languages. Five points of view across four days.
A first-class smoking room where brandy jumps a half-inch in a glass and a man finishes his drink without lifting his head. A second-class cabin where a wife counts eighty-three rivets between the boat-deck rail and the water. A third-class staircase that locks before it lifts. A boat-deck where survival is offered one person at a time, and the question of what marriage means becomes the question of who steps in and who steps back.
Saw-stroke counts in cold water. A coped joint recited instead of a wife's name. A wedding ring tied to a string round a swollen hand. A frostbite-mutilated hand four years later cupping a child's fist around a small flat river stone in a back yard in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The Last Hours of Titanic is a novel about class, marriage, and the terrible arithmetic of survival, told from inside the trades and tongues of the people who lived it.
For readers of Hamnet, The North Water, and Days Without End. Three marriages. One night.