Blue Island

In April 1912, William Thomas Stead, the pioneering British journalist, went down with the Titanic. Ten years later, his daughter Estelle published this extraordinary volume: a purported communication from beyond the veil, received through automatic writing. Stead describes the moment of his death, the strange passage into whatever lies beyond, and the nature of the island realm where souls find themselves after departing the material world. The book is at once a grieving daughter's love letter and a window into the desperate, widespread hope of the post-war era, when millions sought to believe that the men lost in the Great War, in shipwrecks, in all the century's catastrophes, had not simply vanished. Estelle pointed to small details, her father's habit of crossing t's and dotting i's while proof-reading, as proof of authenticity. Whether one reads it as genuine spirit communication or powerful self-delusion, Blue Island remains a haunting document of love refusing to accept the finality of death.