Wild and Distant Seas: A Novel

Evangeline Hussey resides on Nantucket, but she still feels like an outsider. She uses a peculiar talent to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would reject her to maintain her husband's inn and her position on the island. Evangeline is left to build a new life from the remnants when an idealistic sailor shows up seeking a warm bed and a bowl of chowder. Tara Karr Roberts' epic novel Wild and Distant Seas follows Evangeline and her descendants from Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and Idaho.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 09 February 2024
Publisher: WW Norton & Co

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island's small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together were once all she needed—but now Hosea is gone, lost at sea. Evangeline is only able to hold on to his inn and her place on the island by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would cast her out.

One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael. He seeks only a warm bed and a bowl of chowder, and yet suddenly, unsettlingly, her careful illusion begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a new life from the pieces that remain.

Her choices ripple through generations, across continents, and into the depths of the sea, in a narrative that follows Evangeline and her descendants from mid-nineteenth-century Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and Idaho. Moving, beautifully written, and elegantly conceived, Wild and Distant Seas takes Moby-Dick as its starting point, but Tara Karr Roberts brings four remarkable women to life in a spellbinding epic all her own.

Weight: 526g
Dimension: 160 x 237 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781324064886