A Titanic Anniversary

Next month, Europa Editions will re-issue the best novel ever published about the Titanic, Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself, a book The New Yorker recently described as "a sleek, masterful Titanic novel." Every Man for Himself was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Award as Novel of the year in 1996.

Below is an excerpt from a March 20 New York Times article about great Titanic books.

For Titanic Anniversary, the Books Go On and On

The centennial anniversary of the Titanic disaster   is April 14, and publishers appear to be hoping that readers maintain an almost infinite appetite for it. Viewed as a group, the number of Titanic-related books that have crossed my desk in recent weeks borders on the comical. But to dip into almost any one of them in particular is to be riveted by a story that remains deeply eerie, dramatic and heartbreaking...

Not all of the books are on the history shelf... Europa Editions is reissuing Beryl Bainbridge’s “Every Man for Himself,” which is set on the ship. Reviewing the book in The Times, Janet Kaye said  , “it is difficult to imagine a more engrossing account of the famous shipwreck than this one.” About the novel’s snobbish first-class passengers, she wrote: “And we begin to care about them, almost despite ourselves. For we realize that they have mistaken imperviousness for invulnerability. They believe that, like the Titanic, they are indestructible.”