Katherine Anne Porter

This “dazzling” National Book Award finalist set aboard an ocean liner in 1931 reflects the passions and prejudices that sparked World War II (San Francisco Chronicle).
August 1931. An ocean liner bound for Germany sets out from the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The ship’s first-class passengers include an idealistic young American painter and her lover; a Spanish dance troupe with a sideline in larceny; an elderly...

Contains three short novels, -- Old Mortality, a story of race tracks, of the Deep South, of the survival and shattering of a family legend; Noon Wine, Texas and a dairy farm rescued from decay by a man who turns out to be an escaped lunatic from Dakota and of the tragedy that ended it all; Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a mystical story of the narrow ledge between life and death, set at the time of the flu epidemic. --Kirkus Reviews.

In 1933 on a German luxury liner sailing from Mexico to Germany, the separate but interlocking stories of the various passengers begins to unfold. Among the many passengers is a divorcee desperate for love and lost youth, a Spanish noblewoman being deported as a political prisoner, an aging alcoholic ballplayer, and a budding Nazi whose brutishness foreshadows the holocaust to come.