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Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
by Ethan Rutherford
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.
2025 National Book Awards Finalists Announced
Here's the list! Which ones have you read? Which are on your radar? Fiction : Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief Karen Russell, The Antidote Ethan Rutherford, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther Bryan Wa...
-kim.kovacs
"Audacious... A classically styled novel that sounds a very contemporary alarm." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." —Publishers Weekly
"Haunting, hallucinatory, and unrelentingly gorgeous, North Sun feels as real as a history and as strange as a myth. The depths of Rutherford's imagination left me enraptured and unsettled. This is the kind of book that will keep talking to you long after you've finished reading." —Jennifer duBois, author of The Last Language
"This book is bonkers and I loved every rollicking, awkward, solemn, gorgeously written, isolated, melancholic, beautiful moment I spent with Arnold Lovejoy, his thoughts, his crew, the unending ice, and the sea, the empty-not-so-empty sea. Ethan Rutherford's North Sun is a damn harrowing sorrowful delight." —Manuel Gonzales, author of The Regional Office is Under Attack!
This information about North Sun was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ethan Rutherford's fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP's Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.
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