The Shipyard's Three Wars
A Novel of the Home Front

About this book:

Three generations of Kelly men stand on the same slipway, but they're building different worlds. Arthur has driven rivets into destroyers since 1917, his hands fluent in the honest language of red-hot iron. His son Connor runs the yard now, trading leather aprons for spreadsheets, convinced that modular construction and labor concessions are the only way to keep the gates from chaining shut forever. And Thomas, nineteen and terrified of the draft board, watches the sparks fly between them—knowing that whether he swings a hammer or reads a blueprint, the ships they launch will carry other boys to a war that makes no sense.

As 1972 curdles into strike votes and Navy deadlines, the Kennebec River Shipbuilding Corporation becomes a pressure vessel for every American fracture: the craftsman versus the technocrat, the father versus the son, the war abroad versus the war at home. Union halls echo with talk of wildcats while the night shift welds hulls destined for Vietnam's coast. In the mold loft, Thomas traces lines he doesn't believe in; on the staging, Arthur drives rivets into a keel that may never see launch day. And somewhere in the office, Connor calculates the exact hour the money runs out.

*The Shipyard's Three Wars* is a sweeping, intimate chronicle of the home front—where the real battle isn't fought with torpedoes, but with blueprints and paychecks, silence and shouted truths, the weight of history and the terror of what comes next. From the clang of the first rivet to the silence after the final whistle, this is the story of what we build, what we break, and what endures when the launch ways run dry.