INTO THE STORM

In the best-selling tradition of Dead Wake and The Finest Hours, the incredible and harrowing true story of the shocking disappearance of the El Faro, a 790 foot cargo ship that sank suddenly in Hurricane Joaquin in October, 2015, taking with it 33 lives, 400 shipping containers, and 300 trailers.

Into the Storm describes, in the manner of an adventure story, what happened to SS El Faro, a 790 foot cargo ship that sunk in the heart of the "Bermuda Triangle" during Hurricane Joaquin in October, 2015, taking with it 400 shipping containers, 300 tractor-trailers and 33 men and women who did not have time even to radio a "Mayday" message.
The book seeks not only to understand, and honor, the crewmembers who fought the storm, but to dig as deeply as possible into the causes of the disaster: the psychology of both captain and corporate masters: the tiny flip in an African wind that gave birth to the hurricane; the tiny, near-molecular "quantum" defects in steel and oil, ship and engine that doomed the giant ship. It ends with a tale of heroism as men and women of the Coast Guard sought to find the ship in the midst of 150 mph winds and towering waves; and adds a tiny note of optimism and good news in the survival of a smaller ship, all of whose men were saved by a single Coast Guard helicopter crew.


George Michelsen Foy is the author of Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human and Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, as well as twelve critically acclaimed novels. He was a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in fiction and his articles, reviews, and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Harper's, the New York Times, and Men's Journal, among others. He teaches creative writing at NYU and divides his time between coastal Massachusetts and New York.