Safety Tips for Living Alone

From one of our greatest living storytellers, a remarkable, gut-wrenching tale of love, duty, and peril set at the height of the Cold War.

In Safety Tips for Living Alone, Jim Shepard weaves the stories of four families whose lives are upended when the men go to work on a dangerous and isolated surveillance platform off the coast of Long Island.

After working his way up to captain, career serviceman Gordon Phelan is offered the command of Texas Tower 4--a wobbly "box over the ocean". Among the team of military personnel and civilians joining Phelan aboard the platform are Roy Bakke, Wilbur Kovarick, and Louie Laino--three strong and dutiful men trying to ensure better lives for their families. But when a powerful storm approaches the tower, the four men--and everyone onboard--must face their increasingly probable deaths.

In his introduction Joshua Ferris writes, "There's no better way to describe the experience of the reader of Shepard's reimagining of this forgotten, misbegotten episode in American history" than to say one is "moved and appalled".