The 1950s ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage—a retro cruise from Long Beach to Hawaii and back—before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, it's a chance to experience a bygone era of decadent luxury, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. But in this novel by the PEN/Faulkner Award winning author of The Great Man, certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below deck intrude on the festivities, throwing a trio of strangers together in an unexpected and startling test of character.

"A captivating voyage.... A tremendously entertaining novel that never asks readers to turn their brains off." —NPR

"Christensen is a master at drawing us into the interior lives of her characters, toeing the line between satire and sympathy."—Washington Post