The Company of the Dead

One hundred years ago early on the morning of April 14, 1912 the Titanic sank. In The Company of the Dead, the first novel by David Kowalski, Jonathan Wells comes from the future to try to spare the lives of the 1200 people who went down with the ship. It is from Wells’s attempt to decrease the chance of changing the future that he only interacts with passengers he knows died in the original voyage, thus the title.

The reader soon sees that the outcome of Wells’s actions are dramatic. America never enters World War I. By April 2012, Germany and Japan control the west and east coasts of the US. America is divided into a union and confederacy.

In April 2012 Joseph R. Kennedy, a grand-nephew of John F. Kennedy lives in a New York occupied by Imperial Japan. Kennedy is a well known figure from the war between Mexico and the second confederacy. As the world teeters on the edge of war, escendants of Astors, Kennedy and Lighthollers discover the time machine Wells used to alter the past. They make the decision to go back and restore the original time line.

The Company of the Dead is an espionage, time travel, alternate history novel. The characters have interesting lives. Read and see what might have been.

Some other new novels featuring the titanic are The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott, House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe and The Distant Waves by Suzanne Weyn.