The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel - Softcover

"Breathes with a contemporary urgency, an exhilarating adventure novel... A genuine page turner that long lingers in the mind." -- Philip Graham " Breathtaking... exquisitely written in every way... fully worthy of the massive, dangerous subject it undertakes. " "[B]oth cunningly cerebral and hair-raisingly visceral... This is an astonishingly good book by a writer we must declare as major." "Andrea Barrett is a unique and indispensable talent. Her ?Voyage of the Narwhal ?is a brilliant reversal of ?Heart of Darkness?: the danger is not that the character's will 'go native,' but that a lust for scientific knowledge and intellectual distinction will drive them to cruelties they would have been incapable of before." -- Thomas Mallon "A wonderful book in the truest sense of the word-wonder-filled." "This novel takes off over the sea, straight out of history and into tragedy... We get to luxuriate in the promise of retribution and in finely calibrated, persuasive prose." "A gripping adventure story... Barrett's marvelous achievement is to have reimagined so graphically that cusp of time when Victorian certainty began to question whether it could encompass the world with its outward-bound enthusiasm alone." "Stunning... Barrett shows the arrogance and delusion that drove the age of exploration better than any nonfiction book could." "Grand, intelligent, wide-ranging work. With elegance and economy, she's pulled off a seemingly impossible feat: critiquing the complacent authority of the 19th century novel in a book that's just as much fun to read as an old-fashioned Victorian opus."

Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration-the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic-Andrea Barrett's compelling novel tells the story of a fateful expedition. Through the eyes of the ship's scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells, we encounter the ?Narwhal?'s crew, its commander, and the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we meet the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery, finally discovering what they had not sought, the secrets of their own hearts.