Below I’ll give you my selections for the best Erik Larson books by a few categories. I will cover these and other great books more in depth later.
- Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (2016)
- In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (2012)
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2004)
- Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (2000)
- Thunderstruck (2007)
- Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man (2019)
- The Last Days of Night: A Novel (2017)
- The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story (2017)
- All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (2017)
- Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1995)
- The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020)
- Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune (2014)
- The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (2014)
- Related YouTube Video
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (2016)
On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (2012)
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2004)
Erik Larson—author of #1 bestseller In the Garden of Beasts—intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World’s Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (2000)
September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning.
Thunderstruck (2007)
In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to