North Sun
Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards for Fiction
From “one of our great artists of catastrophe” (Laura van den Berg) comes North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther—an allegory of extraction and a tale of adventure and endurance during the waning days of the American whaling industry.
Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.
With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ethan Rutherford’s seafaring historical adventure is an enveloping tale of humanity’s appetites and the roaring ocean’s indifference. One 19th-century captain scuttles his ship in the icy sea and disappears. Another is commissioned by the mysterious Ashley family—whose fortune was built on the waning whaling industry—to find him. The siren song that centres the narrative is Sarah Ashley, who’s the wife of the missing captain and the object of desire of his pursuer. On the ensuing journey, Rutherford introduces elements into the fever-dream tale that could be mystical…or could stem from madness. Like a dark, epic sea shanty, the specifics aren’t as important as the haunting feel and unrelenting rhythm. And yet, one thing that cuts through the lyricism is the stark, bloody, unconscionable brutality of whale and walrus hunts—a barbarism that’s paralleled by the ocean’s disregard for the men, and the men’s contempt for each other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The evocative first novel from Rutherford (after the story collection Farthest South) depicts the end of the whaling era in the late 1870s. Worn-out captain Arnold Lovejoy is tasked by whaling baron Mr. Ashley with retrieving his son-in-law, Benjamin Leander, who's gone native on the Alaskan coast after his ship was crushed by the ice, leaving his wife Sarah and their frail child behind. Accompanying captain Lovejoy aboard the whaleship Esther are two others with tasks of their own: mysterious passenger Edmund Thule and a presence unseen by most, a seabird-man spirit named Old Sorrel who begins to haunt the crew halfway through the voyage. As Lovejoy sails the Esther to the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska in search of Leander, his crew hunts whales for oil and sport. Chronicling in brisk and poetic prose their numerous travails, needless deaths, and hidden perversions, Rutherford plumbs the depths men will sink to in extracting what they desire from nature and their fellow man. This harsh and stark ballad of a bygone time will move readers.
