International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award

Part adventure narrative, part love story, this extraordinary chronicle captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth-century romance with the mystery of the arctic. Combining fact and fiction, Andrea Barrett focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a scholar-naturalist accompanying the expedition of the Narwhal. Through his eyes we meet the various crew members and the expedition's blustery commander, obsessed with the search for an open polar sea, and we experience the wild, disturbing beauties of that last unexplored region. In counterpoint to his views are those of the Esquimaix, witness to the expedition's exploits, and of the women left behind in Philadelphia, who can only imagine what lies beyond the north wind. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and history. In the real nineteenth-century expeditions, explorers' documents always cast the writer as hero. But what really happened up there, in the long winter darkness, trapped in ice? On the Narwhal, everyone is frightened, nothing is certain, and heroes emerge in unexpected guises. Barrett's explorers discover - as all explorers do - not what was always there and never needed discovering, but the state of their own souls. Andrea Barrett, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction (1996), has also received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an honourary degree from Union College. She has taught at the MFA program for writers at the Warren Wilson College, has been a visiting writer at colleges and universities and a faculty mamber of numerous writers' conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is the author of four previous novels and lives in Rochester, New York.

The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett Nominated by:

The Voyage of the Narwhal by
Andrea Barrett

Nominated by: