The North Water
A doomed Arctic whaler carrying an opium-addicted surgeon and a man who is simply evil.
Patrick Sumner, an army surgeon disgraced in India and addicted to laudanum, signs onto a Hull whaler bound for the Arctic in 1859. Also aboard is Henry Drax, a harpooner who is simply and unrepentantly evil. McGuire writes the ice, the blubber and the violence with a density that makes the book physically unpleasant in the way it intends, and the moral question it leaves is whether Sumner is capable of anything beyond survival.
Recommended by 1 Person
Nathan Harris
When you feel transported like that, just by the faint recollections of a reading experience
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