The North Water

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 The man looks untroubled. This is not yet the moment he is waiting for. This is only a dull but necessary interlude, a pause. The barman picks up a wooden club and creaks up the hinge of the bar. Hull, 1859, a whaling ship sits in harbour waiting to set sail for the Arctic. Amongst its crew is Henry Drax; a drunk, brutal harpoonist with an extraordinary and shocking capacity for mindless violence and sexual depravity. He is joined by Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon whose experiences during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 have left him scarred mentally and physically with a powerful addiction to opiates. He is a man with nothing left to lose and precious few options open to him. As the true purposes of the expedition become clear, the confrontation between the two men plays out in the freezing darkness of an Arctic winter. This stunning powerhouse of a novel, which resonates with echoes of Melville and Dickens, draws the reader inexorably down, down and further down into the nature of man in the utmost hinterland of the inhabited world. Dark, biting, brutal and vital, this is an unforgettable account of natural savagery in all its forms, red in tooth and claw.