Tsukiyama’s prose is beautiful and evocative. As Mauna Loa rumbles and spews, long held secrets rise to the surface, too. With an angry and active Mauna Loa as a fitting backdrop, as well as the infamous sugar plantations, the masterful Gail Tsukiyama-I will read anything she writes-spins a dual-timeline tale that interweaves the experiences-both good and bad-of a Japanese American family. I loved this one.Īt more than 13,000 feet above sea level, Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawaii is the largest active volcano on the planet, and apparently among the most active, having erupted 33 times since its first recorded one in 1843.

Unsolved mysteries of this magnitude beg to have a story supposed about them. Lawhon embraces the mystery of this disaster and crafts a compelling story from the point of view of five passengers-the Stewardess, the Navigator, the American, the Journalist, and the Cabin Boy. What history can’t tell us is exactly why the dirigible burst into flames so close to completing its flight.

History tells us the airship, the largest ever built, exploded seconds before landing and that 36 people perished. In May 1937, nearly 100 people stepped aboard the Hindenburg in Frankfurt, Germany, for what would prove to be a doomed flight. So here are my top ten books, in no particular order, that utilize the oh-so-generous natural disaster as a framework for the story. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s the easy way out, but natural disasters are quite adept at thrusting ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances sometimes they and they alone are the antagonist. A natural disaster, on the other hand, can provide a hefty share of it, which means I can shift all the remaining obstacle-creating upon any flesh-and-blood antagonist. With a calm setting, all of the opposition to the antagonist’s quest has to be created by me. I assured her that I’d written a number of books without utter chaos as the locale, but I’d found that books with calm settings are actually harder to write. A reader once asked me, in a somewhat puzzled tone, why I liked writing novels with a natural disaster as the backdrop-she’d noticed I’ve utilized a fire, the 1918 flu pandemic, and now an epic earthquake for settings.

Bright as heaven