I was angry at the characters and annoyed at how many small things could have been avoided … that could have saved 1500 lives. It’s more than heartbreakingly sad … it’s bone crushing, weary heart devastation. It’s a book that had me begging, crying and grieving for people long before my time. This ship was the SS Californian and this is its story. What I didn’t know until I read the book was that there was a ship nearby that saw the lights of the Titanic, that saw it’s distress signals and was within rescuing distance. Simply put The Midnight Watch is an emotional journey that will have you screaming at the book, begging the characters to make different choices because you know the outcome already. The Midnight Watchby David Dyer is this story and yet, it’s so much more and not quite that Titanic story at the same time. The great sensational cruise liner that was unsinkable until it … well sank. Haunted by the fifteen hundred who went to their deaths in those icy waters, and by the loss of his own baby son years earlier, Steadman must either find redemption in the Titanic’s tragedy or lose himself.īased on true events, The Midnight Watch is at once a heart-stopping mystery and a deeply knowing novel – about the frailty of men, the strength of women, the capriciousness of fate and the price of loyalty. So begins a strange dance around the truth by these three men. Now Stone, under his captain’s orders, must carry his secret in silence, while Steadman is determined to find it out. Herbert Stone must have seen something, and yet his ship did nothing while the calamity took place. Why did the Californian look on while the Titanic sank?Īs soon as Boston American reporter John Steadman lays eyes on the man who stood the midnight watch on the Californian, he knows there’s another story lurking behind the official one.

Just after midnight the first of eight distress rockets is fired. On a wretchedly cold night in the North Atlantic, a steamer stopped in an icefield sees the glow of another ship on the horizon. Sometimes the smallest of human failings can lead to the greatest of disasters Publisher: Penguin Random House Australiaĭavid Dyer’s astonishing novel The Midnight Watch is based on the true story of the SS Californian, the ship that saw the Titanic’s distress rockets and yet, unfathomably, did nothing.

The Midnight Watch by David Dyer