Books like The age of Titanic by John Wilson Foster

Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm recounts the 1991 Nor’easter that swallowed the fishing boat Andrea Gail, blending vivid survivor accounts, maritime history, and meteorological science into a gripping tale of human endurance against nature’s fury.

A wealthy duke's mysterious romantic pursuit of a dour socialite sets off a dangerous game of wits and intrigue in 19th-century England’s aristocracy, with the initials J.R. as a crucial clue.

This book is a brilliantly original and gripping new look at the sinking of the Titanic through the prism of the life and lost honor of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner. Books have been written and films have been made, we have raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, and 1000 men, lighting their last cigarettes, prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner and inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety. Accused of cowardice and of dictating the Titanic's excessive speed, Ismay became, according to one headline, "the most talked-of man in the world." The first victim of a press hate campaign, he never recovered from the damage to his reputation, and while the other survivors pieced together their accounts of the night, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again. Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay to the beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage, Frances Wilson explores Ismay's desperate need to tell his story, to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living with the consciousness of lost honor. - Jacket flap.

Isaku is a nine-year-old boy living in a remote, desperately poor fishing village on the Japan Sea coast. To save the family from starvation, his father has sold himself into indentured servitude, leaving Isaku and his strong-willed mother to care for three younger children. Forced to grow up well before his time, Isaku is faced with a number of mysteries, not least among them his own nascent sexuality and the legend of O-fune-sama - the merchant ships that wreck offshore from time to time, providing the village with unexpected bounty: rice, wine, and rich, unheard-of delicacies. The villagers catch barely enough fish to subsist on, and distill salt from seawater to sell to other villages. But this industry serves another, more sinister purpose: they hope the fires of the salt cauldrons will lure passing ships toward the shore and onto rocky shoals. When a ship runs aground, they slaughter the crew and loot the cargo. As the end of his father's bondage approaches - the day Isaku has been waiting for - a ship founders on the rocks, and the villagers rejoice. But its cargo is not at all the manna of their hopes.