The Last Cruise

The Last Cruise

By Kate Christensen
Unabridged
$13.00 $20.00
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Entertaining and elegantly written... Kate Christensen demonstrates there's life to be found in what may appear to be the creakiest of fictional premises... [She] is a sharp observer, not only of the layered social world of the Queen Isabella but of the shifting relationships between her characters...I kept thinking of Barbara Pym, another novelist who wrote astute novels about contained worlds. Like Pym — who has been described as the most under-rated writer of the 20th century — Christensen is easy to misjudge, but, as she demonstrates in The Last Cruise she's quite capable of navigating deep waters.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR
The 1950s ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage—a retro cruise from Long Beach to Hawaii and back—before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, it’s a chance to experience a bygone era of decadent luxury, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones—or children, for that matter. But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless mid-twentieth century, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below deck intrude on the festivities, throwing a trio of strangers together in an unexpected and startling test of character.