What the Lake Gives Back: A Novel of Great Lakes Storm 1913

Sixteen men came ashore in one week. Nine of them were never claimed.On the night of 9 November 1913, the worst storm in the recorded history of the Great Lakes crossed Lake Huron and blew at hurricane force for ten hours. Eight ships went down. A hundred and eighty-seven men were lost in six hours.Nobody in the village of Harrow Bay saw a thing. They were indoors with the shutters closed, and the largest thing anyone there knew about that night was a barn roof coming off.On Monday the lake began handing things back.Orpha Hallock has run her late husband's undertaking business for two years. The county coroner is eighteen miles inland behind a fallen tree, the telegraph is down, and the work falls to her: to write down what she can see of each man who comes out of the water, before anybody is allowed to know his name. Height. Teeth. Hands. What he was wearing, and who had mended it.It is the only technology she has. In 1913 there are no fingerprints on file, no dental records, no photograph that will travel. There is a description, written by hand, sent by mail, into the hands of somebody who is already looking.Then two of the dead come ashore wearing life belts from a ship they never sailed on.That detail is true. It happened along that shore in November 1913, it was reported at the time, and it has never been explained. This novel is the answer.What the Lake Gives Back is a novel of the Great Storm of 1913 told entirely from the shore - a book about the ordinary, unglamorous, exacting work of giving the dead their names back, and about the woman who kept the book. It never once goes out on the water.For readers of The Frozen River, The North Water and News of the World, and for anyone who has read the histories of the 1913 storm and wondered what it was like on the beach.