One Day in Santiago Harbor
A Novel of the Spanish-American War

About this book:

In the sweltering belly of a blockade runner trapped in Santiago Harbor, stoker Tomás counts his life in shovelfuls of coal and heartbeats until dawn. Outside, the U.S. North Atlantic Squadron waits with battleships that can gut his vessel before it clears the channel. Inside, Admiral Cervera has ordered a suicide sortie—steam up by three a.m., breakout at first light. Tomás and the ancient, tattooed Mateo have hours to raise pressure in boilers that have sat cold for weeks, while a nervous lieutenant watches with a pistol and a cargo hold full of Mauser cartridges threatens to turn their iron hull into a floating bomb. There is no glory in the stokehold, only the rhythm of the shovel, the bite of steam, and the cold calculation of which death a man might choose.

From the Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of *The Iron Tide* comes a searing, deck-plate view of the Spanish–American War’s climactic moment. *One Day in Santiago Harbor* strips away the brass-buttoned romance of naval history to reveal the war as it was lived by the men who fed the fires: Spanish conscripts, merchant mariners pressed into service, a seventeen-year-old boy who believes American shells burn underwater. With the visceral authenticity of *Das Boot* and the moral complexity of *Master and Commander*, this is historical fiction forged in white heat—where courage isn't a speech on the bridge, but a burned hand wrapped in grease-soaked linen, gripping a shovel for one more watch.

As the searchlights of the *Iowa* and *Oregon* sweep the narrows and the guns of El Morro fall silent behind them, the *Reina de la Paz* follows the armored cruisers into the jaws of the most one-sided naval engagement of the modern era. But the real battle has been raging for days in the dark below the waterline—between duty and survival, between the old sailor who ate an onion at Trafalgar and the young stoker who dreams of Atlantic breezes and a boat of his own. When the first eight-inch shell arrives, there will be no officers to give orders. Only iron, fire, and the men who know exactly how hard they have to pull.