Author: Elizabeth Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell approaches familiar historical events through intimate and unsettled perspectives. On a Cold Dark Sea returns to the sinking of the Titanic through three women who survive in the same lifeboat: Charlotte, a young English con artist; Esme, an American passenger guarding the truth about a shipboard affair; and Anna, an immigrant who cannot escape what she heard in the water. The novel moves between the 1912 disaster and a reunion twenty years later, allowing secrecy and memory to shape the suspense as strongly as the shipwreck itself. The 2018 Lake Union Publishing edition was joined by a Brilliance Audio production narrated by Siiri Scott. Blackwell has described beginning the project despite doubts that readers needed another Titanic story. Her solution was to focus less on a comprehensive reconstruction than on how survivors revise the past, making a famous catastrophe the beginning of the women's moral choices rather than their conclusion.