America is marching headlong into the Depression. Unemployment is rife, Reds are protesting in New York's streets, but on the waterfront Prohibition has failed to water down the beer. The rich are meanwhile getting richer, and the poor only more destitute, in this powerfully wrought novel that crosses the paths of two men from opposite ends of the social spectrum. While the industrialist and sometime big-game hunter Carl Schenck has amassed a fortune fabulous enough to expect the world to cater to his whims, seaman Will Boden has lost his boat, his wife, and his reputation. Second chances don't come easily to a captain who's abandoned his own ship - until Schenck's determination to organize an Arctic safari presents Boden with the opportunity to do what no seasoned seaman would: to navigate a luxuriously appointed but ill-equipped yacht, the Lodestar, through perilous Polar waters. Its adventure as harrowing as a tale by Jack London, its vision as haunting as Joseph Conrad's, this remarkable novel pitches the master and crew of the Lodestar into the grip of treacherous Arctic seas and moral disaster. Praise for Sea Change by Peter Nichols: "Marvelous . . . In his understated telling of the story, he never seeks your sympathy. He just breaks your heart." - New York Times Book Review "A heartbreaking and harrowing sea tale" - Los Angeles Times
Peter Nichols is the author of the national bestsellers "A Voyage for Madmen" and "Evolution's Captain" and three other books of fiction, memoir, and non-fiction. He spent ten years at sea working as a professional captain and has taught creative writing at Georgetown University. NYU in Paris, and Bowdoin College. After living in France and Maine, he is astonished to find that he lives in Tucson, Arizona.
"Not an unswerving literary trajectory. I've wanted to write - and to be a writer - since childhood. In my 20s I worked at writerly jobs in advertising and journalism while I wrote two unpublished novels. Then I stepped aboard a friend's yacht and my life swung away toward boats and the sea for a decade. I became, in turn, a boat bum, a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed commercial captain, and a proficient navigator with sextant. At age 33, the leaky 27-foot, engineless wooden sailboat that had been my home for 5 years, in which I'd twice crossed the Atlantic, sank near the end of my third crossing (I was alone). But I had found a subject.
I was rescued and crawled ashore in Los Angeles where, naturally, I began writing screenplays. I was fatally encouraged: I found agents and made a little money, but never saw my screenplays (they were full of leaky projects and rootless characters) turned into films. Unhappy with my screenwriting career (and my non-writing career of many jobs, including being a 'ship wrangler' in Borneo for a bad pirate movie), I fled LA to a shack in Northern California. Desperate to write something good and see it become real somehow (and unqualified for any other work), I wrote what became a memoir of my years afloat and the twinned sinkings of my boat and first marriage (Sea Change). In the next ten years I published a novel and three more books of non-fiction - all about not so much the sea and sailors, but fringe characters who have retreated to the water's edge and have nowhere else to go.
Being published changed everything. I went fairly quickly from being a yachtie, shepherd, carpenter, ship wrangler with literary delusions to a visiting professor of creative writing at some good colleges. I've been fortunate to have wonderful students. I love teaching because I can tell young writers what it took me decades to learn - simply, that yes, you can, if you really believe in yourself and don't give up. I dreamed of becoming a writer and I became one. And if I did it, they can too." PN, 2010
