Mitch Albom: On The Stranger in the Lifeboat: A Novel

Mitch Albom is a bestselling author, screenwriter, playwright, and nationally syndicated columnist. He is the author of five consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lessons, the bestselling memoir of all time. In The Stranger in the Lifeboat: A Novel (Harper), Albom asks what would happen if we called on God for help and God actually appeared? It’s a question that must be contemplated by a group of shipwrecked passengers, adrift in a raft after a ship explosion and struggling to survive. Three days in, they’re short on water, food, and hope when they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him in. “Thank the Lord we found you,” a passenger says. “I am the Lord,” the man whispers. And he says he can only save them if they all believe in him. Who is this man? What actually caused the explosion? Are the survivors already in heaven, or in hell? The answers may be found in the notebook of one the passengers, the book’s narrator, found inside the empty life raft a year later when it washes ashore on the island of Montserrat. It falls to the island’s chief inspector, Jarty LeFleur, a man battling his own demons, to solve the mystery of what really happened.