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The North Water: A Novel, by Ian McGuire
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Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"The North Water...is a great white shark of a book ― swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable."
―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Riveting and darkly brilliant….The North Water feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition.”
―Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review
"[An] audacious work of historical suspense fiction...It's the poetic precision of McGuire's harsh vision of the past that makes his novel such a standout...absolutely transporting."
―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
A nineteenth-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp, and highly original tale that grips like a thriller.
Behold the man: stinking, drunk, and brutal. Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaler bound for the rich hunting waters of the arctic circle. Also aboard for the first time is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money, and no better option than to sail as the ship's medic on this violent, filthy, and ill-fated voyage.
In India, during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which man can stoop. He had hoped to find temporary respite on the Volunteer, but rest proves impossible with Drax on board. The discovery of something evil in the hold rouses Sumner to action. And as the confrontation between the two men plays out amid the freezing darkness of an arctic winter, the fateful question arises: who will survive until spring?
With savage, unstoppable momentum and the blackest wit, Ian McGuire's The North Water weaves a superlative story of humanity under the most extreme conditions.
- Sales Rank: #10429 in Books
- Published on: 2016-03-15
- Released on: 2016-03-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.59" h x 1.04" w x 6.41" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
“The North Water, Ian McGuire’s savage new novel about a 19th-century Arctic whaling expedition, is a great white shark of a book―swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable. [...] Mr. McGuire is such a natural storyteller―and recounts his tale here with such authority and verve―that 'The North Water' swiftly immerses the reader in a fully imagined world. [...] Mr. McGuire nimbly folds all these melodramatic developments into his story as it hurtles toward its conclusion. He has written an allusion-filled novel that still manages to feel original, a violent tale of struggle and survival in a cinematically beautiful landscape.”
―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Riveting and darkly brilliant….The North Water feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition.”
―Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review
“[An] audacious work of historical suspense fiction...It's the poetic precision of McGuire's harsh vision of the past that makes his novel such a standout...absolutely transporting.”
―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
“Mesmerizing . . . . Told in grisly language that calls to mind Cormac McCarthy,The North Water begs such ontological questions as: What profit it a man who saves his skin but misplaces his soul?”
―Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
“Bold and frightening, The North Water offers many satisfactions and little comfort. . . . Readers of Cormac McCarthy know that beautiful writing and bloody murder go together as well now as they did in Homer, and Ian McGuire proves it.”
―Jonathan Arac, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Carries echoes of Melville and Lord Jim . . . engrossing . . . unsparing and utterly convincing.”
―Highbrow Magazine
“A dark, brilliant yarn….An amazing journey.”
―Publishers Weekly, starred review
“McGuire delivers…moments of fine prose that recall Seamus Heaney's harsh music, as when an iceberg is described as 'an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor.’”
―Kirkus Reviews
“Raw and compulsively readable . . . think The Revenant for the Arctic Circle.”
―The Millions
“It’s one of those ones that you want to wake up at 5.30 in the morning so you can read some more.”
―James Daunt, founder of Daunt Books and managing director of Waterstones
“The North Water is a conspiracy thriller stuffed into the skin of a blood-and-guts whaling yarn… The novel is a stunning achievement, by turns great fun and shocking, thrilling and provocative. . . . Behold: one of the finest books of the year.”
―Independent
“McGuire delivers one bravura set-piece after another….The North Water has, in places, a Conrad–Melville undercurrent, but for the most part it is Dickens’s influence that is most keenly felt….This is a stunning novel, one that snares the reader from the outset and keeps the tightest grip until its bitter end.”
―Financial Times
“McGuire’s prose is fresh and vivid and his novel as a whole is atmospheric and intellectually fecund. Its surface might be awash with blood; but beneath it flows a current of dark and transporting beauty.”
―Spectator
“As a storyteller, McGuire has a sure and unwavering touch, and he has engineered a superbly compelling suspense narrative….As a stylist, too, McGuire is never less than assured. He has produced a fine addition to the maritime canon, but one that revivifies it with a thoroughly modern acuity of style. He has established himself, too, as a writer of exceptional craft and confidence…”
―Irish Times
“Compared with this savage tale of Arctic survival, Leonardo DiCaprio’s bear-wrestling ordeal in The Revenant looks like something out of A. A. Milne….McGuire expertly arranges all this mayhem, and the narrative is horrifically gripping. The North Water is smoothly readable despite the horrors it depicts, and that’s testament to the quality of McGuire’s prose. Such fine writing might have been lifted from the pages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.”
―Independent on Sunday
“It is a vivid read, full of twists, turns, period detail and strong characters. The setting is original too, and the description of harpooning and flensing of a whale have been forever etched on my memory. This melodramatic blood and urine-stained tale is an enjoyable contrast to most literary fiction.”
―The Times
“Uncompromising in its language, relentless in the unfolding of its blood-soaked narrative, this is not a novel for the squeamish, but it has exceptional power and energy.”
―Sunday Times
“Terrific, seamed with pitch black humour and possessed of a momentum that's kept up to the final, unexpected but resoundingly satisfying scene….inspired.”
―Daily Mail
“The strength of The North Water lies in its well-researched detail and persuasive descriptions of the cold, violence, cruelty, and the raw, bloody business of whale-killing.”
―Guardian
“Beware: this book is quite a ride. The violence is ghastly, the queasy sense of moral decay all-pervasive. McGuire makes Quentin Tarantino look like Jane Austen….the language has a harsh, surprising beauty that contrasts the spectacular setting with the greedy bankrupt men who force their way northward, armed with harpoons for slaughter.”
―New Statesman
“I utterly believed in the world that McGuire has created….amazingly impressive set-pieces….[The violence] underlines the point that he is trying to make, a Dickensian point, which is that all privilege rests on squalor.”
―BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
“Full of foul deeds in a savagely beautiful setting, The North Water is a gripping, pitch-black yarn.”
―Sydney Morning Herald
“This is a novel that takes us to the limits of flesh and blood. Utterly convincing and compelling, remorselessly vivid, and insidiously witty, The North Water is a startling achievement.”
―Martin Amis, New York Times bestselling author of Zone of Interest
“It's a fast-paced, gripping story set in a world of gruesome violence and perversity, where ‘why?’ is not a question and murder happens on a whim: but where a very faint ray of grace and hope lights up the landscape of salt and blood and ice. A tour de force of narrative tension and a masterful reconstruction of a lost world that seems to exist at the limits of the human imagination.”
―Hilary Mantel, New York Times bestselling author of Wolf Hall
“The North Water is the rare novel capable of making a past time and place palpable. Ian McGuire writes with a poet's attentiveness to detail, which infuses this dark and violent novel with an unsettling beauty.”
―Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of Serena and Above the Waterfall
“The North Water is a whaling novel in the same way that Blood Meridian is a western. I enjoyed the brashness and the economy of the writing, the sense of humanity, and the sly, black humor. The novel wasn't afraid to take chances and I was surprised several times. I was always entertained. . . . An exceedingly well-written historical adventure.”
―Shannon Burke, author of Into the Savage Country
“If one took Melville's dream journal and compiled the nightmares into one harrowing novel, it would be Ian McGuire's The North Water. The claustrophobic conflict between the flawed humanity of Patrick Sumner and the supernatural evil of Henry Drax examines the brutal depths of the human soul.”
―James Scott, author of The Kept
“Enthralling and brutal. A vivisection of hard men in a cold world, and a propulsive, suspenseful adventure into the darkness of mortal existence.”
―Dennis Mahoney, author of Bell Weather and Fellow Mortals
About the Author
Ian McGuire grew up near Hull, England, and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Virginia in the United States. He is the cofounder and codirector of the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing. He writes criticism and fiction, and his stories have been published in Chicago Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.
Most helpful customer reviews
59 of 62 people found the following review helpful.
Literary Thriller Delivers & Meets High Expectations
By kas
I couldn't wait to read The North Water after reading the synopsis, which made it sound like a superlatively disturbing thriller bordering on horror. I was lucky enough to receive an Advance Review Copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program, and my reading experience left me with the impression that the novel had only been slightly over-hyped. Despite my unrealistically high expectations, I found the book to be a uniquely compelling read, which kept my mind entirely absorbed from start to finish so that I finished it in one sitting.
Author Ian McGuire distinguishes his story from the pack with distinctive stylistic choices as well as the inclusion of gruesome plot elements with the potential to shock and horrify the experienced thriller reader. I myself was not particularly shocked or horrified by these parts of the story. What kept me turning the pages was the sense of immediacy conveyed in the way the events were related. Two key features of McGuire's technique are his use of the present tense for exposition of the narrative and the inclusion of considerable dialogue. Although I would not call the effect cinematic, the novel would work well as a movie, I think.
In any case, I highly recommend this novel to readers seeking a quality thrill. Page-turners of this caliber -- both in terms of style and content -- are few and far between in my experience. Thank you for reading my ideas; I hope they prove somehow useful to some of you.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Exciting Story, Unusual Setting -- But Could Have Been a Bigger Book
By Philip Reed
After the first chapter I almost stopped reading The North Water. It seemed unnecessarily violent and repulsive. The author rubbed our nose in the filth of the a whaling town and the psychopathic behavior of a harpooner named Drax. A writer paints a scene by choosing details and McGuire chose the most disgusting and loathsome things to focus on. McGuire clearly has great descriptive powers but uses them to vividly describe people's heads being crushed, throats being slashed and blood spraying. I had the same reaction when reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. In that case I did stop reading, even though I had enjoyed McCarthy's earlier books. McGuire and McCarthy seemed to enlarge these freakish incidents not to accurately portray life at that time but to shock and horrify needlessly. It feels self-indulgent, like watching a Quintin Tarantino movie where he revels irresponsibly in gore, turning it into what he sees as an art form.
As I continued reading I became more involved in the story which follows a whaling ship heading into the north waters as whales are becoming increasingly scarce. The descriptions of life on board ship are well researched and the characters begin to emerge in a subtle and engaging way. There are no sympathetic characters but as the tale progresses, I couldn't help finding myself most connected to Sumner, the ship's surgeon. The book begins to take on the feeling of a thriller or even detective story as the captain investigates the rape and then murder of a cabin boy. After this, it becomes a survival story with an epic chase across the ice.
There is a cinematic quality to McGuire's story telling where things happen with no preparation. We are transported from one time and place to another with no explanation. It just happens. It felt like McGuire laid the groundwork for a much bigger book in terms of both plot and theme. The writing is at times pretentious as McGuire needlessly flashes an impressive vocabulary as if to say, "This is what real writing is all about." When was the last time you had to look up a the meaning of a word in one of Hemingway's stories? But in The North Water I went to the dictionary many times. While it does feel like a bigger book, McGuire loses confidence and defaults to the thriller genre providing an ending that is unexpected, exciting and -- for me at least -- rewarding. The final lines of the book are haunting and left me pondering everything that came before and the larger meaning of the story.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant for a lot of reasons
By M. Dynarski
I've not read other books by Ian McGuire but I will now. It's hard to imagine how he could bring to life the Greenland whaling trade in the mid-eighteen hundreds, but it comes through powerfully here--the cold, the chase and kill, the venality of the officers and shipowners, the will to survive under horrifying conditions, the utter lack of humanity of the villain (can't say more without spoiling). I reached the ending and thought---what.. over so soon?!
The scene with the bear hunt and the scene of an iceberg sliding along the ice formation destroying everything--I can't get them out of my head.
I've tried to read Moby Dick and failed--it's my white whale of literature, so to speak. But maybe this book is just better in evoking whaling and the weirdness of the northland. Spellbinding.
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