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.
Publication date: March 11th, 2025
Paperback ISBN: 9781646053582
eBook ISBN: 9781646053704
Description
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.
Biographical Note
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.
Reviews
Longlisted for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"Audacious... A classically styled novel that sounds a very contemporary alarm." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Genius... Rutherford takes full advantage of the freedom his commitment to originality grants him to lead the novel into far stranger and more intriguing territory than its opening act might suggest." —The Baffler
"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
"A feverish historical novel on the hubris of the exploitation of the natural world." —Independent Book Review, starred review
"Rutherford’s lyrical, spare prose has a cadence like the movement of the sea." —Harvard Review Online
"I don't know how, but Ethan Rutherford freaking did it. He wrote the Moby Dick for our times." —Emily Barton, author of The Book of Esther
"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!
"North Sun is a deeply wonderful, strange and magnificent book. I swam through its unique pages with glee and horror and joy and came up for air gasping at what a deeply brilliant writer Ethan Rutherford is. The novel is completely exhilarating. How I shall miss its company, how I do long for Old Sorrel. In short, I consider this completely original tale of man and nature and ocean an absolute triumph." —Edward Carey, author of Edith Holler
"Unspeakably gorgeous. Absolutely soaked in atmosphere, this whaling tale is haunting, ethereal, wispy. The journey of Arnold Lovejoy is one that could rival Ahab himself. This will be one of my top books of the year." —Andrew Preston, CoffeeTree Books