Voices of the Lusitania

On 7 May 1915, without warning and against international law, the German submarine U-20 torpedoed the British Cunard liner RMS Lusitania off the southern Irish coast.

She sank in just eighteen minutes with the loss of 1,198 of the 1,959 passengers aboard, including 128 citizens of the then neutral United States.

What happened off the Irish coast that warm spring day of 1915 was a personal tragedy that ranks with the Titanic, lost three years earlier.

The political fall-out was momentous, triggering a sequence of events that two years later would bring the United States into the First World War.

It would be said that although the ship had failed to deliver her 200 American passengers safely to Liverpool in 1915, in 1917 and 1918 her ghost carried 2 million US troops to the Western Front.

Through the voices of victims and perpetrators, politicians and diplomats, the public and the press, this is the story of how one ship altered the course of history.

Praise for Diana Preston:

‘A complex story of heroism and courage … compulsively readable’ - Independent on Sunday

‘It is not easy nowadays to write an original book on the First World War … but Preston has succeeded’ - The Sunday Times

‘The most comprehensive and accessible account of the sinking there has been or perhaps will be’ - Sunday Telegraph

‘A fitting monument to a multitudinous loss’ - John Updike, the New Yorker

‘Impressive … her portrait of a world convulsed in war is compelling and comprehensive’ - Wall Street Journal

Diana Preston is a historian, writer and broadcaster. She is the author of the acclaimed; ‘A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole’, ‘Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer Rising’, ‘Cleopatra and Antony’ and ‘Before the Fall-Ou:. The Human Chain Reaction from Marie Curie to Hiroshima’. With her husband Michael, she has co-authored ‘A Pirate of Exquisite Mind’ and ‘A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time’. She lives in London.

Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.