Peter Nichols

In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop. It was a feat that had never been accomplished and one that would forever change the face of sailing. Ten months later, only one of the nine men would cross the finish line and earn fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the reward was madness, failure, and death. In this extraordinary book, Peter Nichols chronicles a contest of the individual against the sea, waged at a time before cell phones, satellite dishes, and electronic positioning systems. A Voyage for Madmen is a tale of sailors driven by their own dreams and demons, of horrific storms in the Southern Ocean, and of those riveting moments when a split-second decision means the difference between life and death.

Set against dramatic Mediterranean Sea views and lush olive groves, The Rocks opens with a confrontation and a secret: What was the mysterious, catastrophic event that drove two honeymooners apart so suddenly and absolutely in 1948 that they never spoke again despite living on the same island for sixty more years? And how did their history shape the Romeo and Juliet–like romance of their (unrelated) children decades later? Centered around a popular seaside resort club and its community, The Rocks is a double love story that begins with a mystery, then moves backward in time, era by era, to unravel what really happened decades earlier.Peter Nichols writes with a pervading, soulful wisdom and self-knowing humor, and captures perfectly this world of glamorous, complicated, misbehaving types with all their sophisticated flaws and genuine longing. The result is a bittersweet, intelligent, and romantic novel about how powerful the perceived truth can be—as a bond, and as a barrier—even if it’s not really the whole story; and how one misunderstanding can echo irreparably through decades.

A small town in coastal Maine is shaken to its core by a serial killer in this crime novel from Peter Nichols, bestselling author of The RocksIn scenic Granite Harbor, life has continued on―quiet and serene―for decades. That is until a local teenager is found brutally murdered in the Settlement, the town’s historic archaeological site. Alex Brangwen, adjusting to life as a single father with a failed career as a novelist, is the town’s sole detective. This is his first murder case and, as both a parent and detective, Alex knows the people of Granite Harbor are looking to him to catch the killer and temper the fear that has descended over the town.Isabel, a single mother attempting to support her family while healing from her own demons, finds herself in the middle of the case when she begins working at the Settlement. Her son, Ethan, and Alex’s daughter, Sophie, were best friends with the victim. When a second body is found, both parents are terrified that their child may be next. As Alex and Isabel race to find the killer in their midst, the town’s secrets―past and present―begin bubbling to the surface, threatening to unravel the tight-knit community.At once a page-turning thriller and a captivating portrait of the social fabric of a small town, Granite Harbor evokes the atmosphere of HBO’s Mare of Easttown with a villain reminiscent of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs.

Evolution's Captain is the story of a visionary but now forgotten English naval officer but for whom the "Darwinian Revolution" would never have occurred. When Captain Robert FitzRoy, the twenty-six-year-old captain of the H.M.S. Beagle , set out for Tierra del Fuego in the fall of 1831, he invited a young naturalist to accompany him. That twenty-two-year-old gentleman was Charles Darwin, and perhaps no single voyage in history had a greater impact on how we would come to understand the world -- in both religious and scientific terms. When the Beagle 's first captain committed suicide while at sea in 1828, he was replaced by a young naval officer of a new mold. Robert FitzRoy was the most brilliant and scientific sea captain of his age. He used the Beagle , a survey vessel, as a laboratory for the new field of the natural sciences. But his plan to bring four "savages" home to England to civilize them as Christian gentlefolk backfired when scandal loomed over their sexual misbehavior at the Walthamstow Infants School. FitzRoy needed to get them out of England fast, and thus was born the second and most famous voyage of the Beagle . FitzRoy feared the loneliness of another long voyage -- with madness in his own family, he was haunted by the fate of the Beagle 's previous captain -- so for company he took with him the young amateur naturalist Charles Darwin. Like FitzRoy, Darwin believed, at the beginning of the voyage, in the absolute word of the Bible and the story of man's creation. The two men spent five years circling the globe together, but by the end of their voyage they had reached startlingly different conclusions about the origins of the natural world. In naval terms, the voyage was a stunning scientific success. But FitzRoy, a fanatical Christian, was horrified by the heretical theories Darwin began to develop. As these began to influence the profoundest levels of religious and scientific thinking in the nineteenth century, FitzRoy's knowledge that he had provided Darwin with the vehicle for his sacrilegious ideas propelled him down an irrevocable path to suicide. This true story -- part biography, part sea drama, and a subtle study of one of the defining moments in the history of science -- reads like the finest historical fiction. It is a chronicle of the remarkable chain of events without which Darwin would most likely have lived and died an obscure English country parson with a fondness for collecting beetles.

In a meditation on sailing, the sea, and the mysteries of love, the author chronicles his and his wife's voyage aboard a wooden boat across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to England, where his marriage foundered, and his return solo odyssey, which also became a journey of self-discovery. Reprint.

"Peter Nichols has crafted a terrifyingly relevant historical narrative...A terrific read." -Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In The Heart of the Sea In 1871, America's last fleet of whaling ships was destroyed in an arctic ice storm. Miraculously, 1,218 men, women and children survived, but the disaster was catastrophic at home. Oil and Ice is the story of one fateful whaling season that illuminates the unprecedented rise and devastating fall of America's first oil economy, and the fate of today's petroleum industry.

"Peter Nichols has crafted a terrifyingly relevant historical narrative...A terrific read."-Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In The Heart of the SeaIn 1871, America's last fleet of whaling ships was destroyed in an arctic ice storm. Miraculously, 1,218 men, women and children survived, but the disaster was catastrophic at home.Oil and Ice is the story of one fateful whaling season that illuminates the unprecedented rise and devastating fall of America's first oil economy, and the fate of today's petroleum industry.

"An old-fashioned adventure yarn . . . Nichols's story pulses with action that is given an extra measure of verisimilitude by his deep knowledge of boats and the sea and the watery landscapes of the Far North."--Richard Bernstein, New York TimesAs harrowing as a tale by Jack London, its vision as haunting as Joseph Conrad's, this masterful novel of maritime adventure crosses the paths of Carl Schenck, a ruthless industrialist whose wealth is as fabulous as his big-game hunter's appetite for blood is limitless, and Will Boden, a seaman down on his luck. It is Schenck's blind resolve to launch an Arctic safari that affords Boden the opportunity to do what no seasoned seaman would, and flouting his own foreboding, he signs on with the Lodestar, a yacht luxuriously appointed for pleasure but drastically ill-equipped for navigating the Arctic. Together, these two men are bound in an epic misadventure that confronts them with not only the perils of the polar seas but also a horrifying moral disaster. "Its major themes consciously derived from those of Conrad and Melville . . . a fiercely eventful novel."--New York Times"A finely crafted adventure and a crackling good read."--Chicago Tribune"An impressive first novel. . . . A literary page-turner that is driven as much by ideas and the writing as plot and characters."--USA Today