![]() And writing about sailing came naturally, thanks to her memories from a childhood partly spent in Chicago, where she frequently joined her parents and siblings for weekend sails on Lake Michigan. Rogan read several nonfiction accounts of seafaring. “The Lifeboat” steers clear of cannibalism, but it explores the same deeply chilling questions of survival, strength, life and death when trapped with a group of strangers after a shipwreck.įor her research Ms. They were rescued four days later and eventually convicted of murder, establishing the principle that killing another person to save one’s own life was not a valid defense. Dudley and Stephens were two starving castaways who, stranded on a lifeboat for weeks with little food, decided to kill and devour one of the other passengers. Dudley and Stephens, was especially intriguing. One famous case that dated to the 19th century, Queen v. Rogan said, when she was curiously digging around in her husband’s criminal law texts on a shelf in their home library. Inspiration for “The Lifeboat” struck around 1999, Ms. Bush administration, when she was in Texas and feeling slightly outnumbered politically.) Rogan painstakingly produced three novels, all of which she later dismissed as not particularly interesting, or not focused enough on plot, lessons that she absorbed for the fourth novel, the book that eventually became “The Lifeboat.” (A fifth novel, “Security,” the story of a group of people trying to protect themselves behind the walls of a gated community, was written during the George W. “I’d really, really try to be consistent about it.” “I wanted those hours,” she said of the late mornings and early afternoons, when the house was quiet and she had time to herself. For a novice, it was a crash course in discipline, in the grind of producing new work every week, and in facing rejection.Ĭharlotte Rogan, whose debut novel, “The Lifeboat,” has won early praise from critics and booksellers. Rogan signed up for a creative writing course at City College. Rogan, tall and chipper with sandy blond hair, her surprising success comes after more than 25 years of writing novels in secret, usually while her husband was at work, and her triplets were at school.įiction was not a driving interest of hers when she was an undergraduate at Princeton in the early 1970s, where she was more captivated by architecture and engineering than by anything else. Writing in The Guardian, Justine Jordan called it “a terrific debut novel,” a “fascinating portrait of a determined, free-thinking young woman, and an inquiry into the puzzle of personality.”įor Ms. It carries sparkling blurbs by Emma Donoghue, the author of “Room,” and Hilary Mantel, the author of “Wolf Hall.” Booksellers have predicted that it will become a hit among book club members, those prized word-of-mouth readers who have helped make best sellers out of novels like “The Help” and “The Paris Wife.” The novel, published this week by Reagan Arthur Books, an imprint of Little, Brown, is already riding a wave of heady praise and early reviews. #Lifeboat the walls full#“The Lifeboat” begins with an unnerving premise: in the opening pages the narrator, a 22-year-old newlywed - and widow - named Grace Winter tells how she is on trial for her life for an event that unfolded during 21 days on a lifeboat full of castaways stranded after the sinking of a luxury liner in the Atlantic Ocean. I do like the sense that it’s so surprising.” “It was unreal,” she said, drinking tea on a recent afternoon at the home here that she shares with her husband, Kevin Rogan, a lawyer. A few months after her 57th birthday, Ms. Rogan pulled the manuscript out of a drawer, practically on a whim, and sent it to an agent, who put it in the hands of an editor at Little, Brown & Company. Rogan began shaping more than a decade ago while she was living in Dallas raising her triplets, who are now in college. Yet she is on the verge of literary success with a critically praised debut novel, “The Lifeboat,” a harrowing tale that Ms. She has not attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or lived in Brooklyn, or been chosen as one of “5 Under 35”- or under any age, for that matter. Charlotte Rogan does not have the impeccable résumé of the typical precocious and talked-about writer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |