For the first time in Russian is the most anticipated debut novel of 2012. The book, which instantly became a bestseller, received rave reviews from Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee and Booker laureate Hilary Mantel; a book already translated into 18 languages. But the Russian translation by the brilliant Elena Petrova, whose translations by Ray Bradbury and Julian Barnes, Iain Banks and Christopher Priest, Graham Greene and Alice Sebold have already become classics, arrived first! After all, no other book will capture the reader’s imagination on the centennial anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Summer of 1914. Europe is on the brink of war, but the future of twenty-two-year-old Grace Winter finally seems cloudless: on a comfortable liner, she and her newly-made husband return from London to New York, where Grace hopes to ingratiate herself with his mother. But in the middle of the Atlantic, a mysterious explosion occurs on the Empress Alexandra; the ship begins to sink, and the husband manages to place Grace in an overcrowded lifeboat. During the three weeks that the boat floats on the waves, Grace discovers such abysses within herself that she had never imagined before. Not everyone is destined to survive this ordeal, but upon returning to New York, Grace faces a test perhaps more severe: a trial. What really happened on the lifeboat? What secret was the Empress Alexandra hiding? What are you ready for, to survive?