Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat (Virago, £12.99) comes garlanded with praise from the likes of J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Rogan, who has only taken up writing after a career in architecture and engineering, tells the story of Grace Winter, a young woman on trial for murder as the novel opens. She and her husband Henry had been travelling on a transatlantic liner, the Empress Alexandra, in 1914. When the ship mysteriously sank, Grace managed to secure a place on a crowded lifeboat, commanded by the enigmatic Hardie. But what happened to her husband? And why did the ship sink?
Rogan does an excellent job of conveying the fear and claustrophobia of a lifeboat full of strangers, whose travails form a large part of the story. Grace is a fascinatingly ambiguous protagonist, someone who is never exactly likeable or sympathetic but who nonetheless commands our interest. Where Rogan perhaps fails is in developing her subsidiary characters and in satisfactorily resolving some of the mysteries she hints at,which makes for a disappointing conclusion.
A different kind of journey forms the basis of Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday, £12.99).
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