By Right of Conquest: A Novel

A gritty, emotionally charged exploration of class divide set aboard an early 20th-century steamship. Jack Armitage is a stoker, a man whose hands are black with coal dust and whose future stretches only as far as the next grueling shift in the stoke-hold. Grace Harmon is wealth incarnate, a heiress whose life exists on a deck far above where Jack sacrifices his body to the engines. When their worlds collide, the novel becomes a tense examination of what happens when the gulf between rich and poor narrows to the width of a single glance. Hornblow writes with raw authenticity about the suffocating desperation of working-class men trapped in a system designed to break them, while also charting the dangerous, forbidden electricity between two people who should have never met. The bar where the firemen gather before departure crackles with bitterness, rebellion, and the weight of lives spent in service to others. This is a novel about the economics of dignity, the impossibility of escape, and the question of whether love can survive where class is a cage.