Publisher's Synopsis
'Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.' This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognised first sentences in literature-along with 'Call me Ishmael' from Moby Dick. Inspired by this classic, Ahab's Wife is not only vivid storytelling at its best but a great and revealing love story. Una Spenser's marriage to Captain Ahab is certainly a crucial element in the narrative of Ahab's Wife, but the story covers vastly more territory. After a spellbinding opening scene, the tale flashes back to Una's childhood in Kentucky; her idyllic adolescence with her aunt and uncle's family at an isolated lighthouse; her adventures disguised as a cabin boy on a whaling ship; her first marriage to a fellow survivor who descends into violent madness; courtship and marriage to Ahab; life as a mother and a rich captain's wife in Nantucket; and involvement with a community of freethinkers where she discovers her truest happiness. Beautifully written, filled with humanity and wisdom, rich in historical detail, authentic and evocative, this splendid novel offers a sweeping, yet intimate picture of a remarkable woman who both typifies and transcends her times.';Naslund actually matches the master, Melville, in all his unearthly poetry and unworldly philosophizing...The narrator, obviously something more than the "sweet, resigned" wife that Melville hardly mentions, belongs to a world in which an intelligent woman's best friends might seem to be Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Keats; her story reads as if one of the Bronte sisters had gone off whaling. Yet for all the literary grandeur, much of the book possesses the reader like an unholy fever. A woman walks through the mist in a wolf-trimmed cloak. A madman cries, "Now we eat our fingernails. Now the spiny stars." Naslund writes with the fearlessness of her protagonist.' Time Magazine'Naslund's...gift for pleasure shines. Her Una is a deep and wayward creature, undaunted by convention, whose descriptions are dense with a languid and sensual interest in the world. Unlike Ahab, Una can wait. She is not driven; for her, the world is enough.' New York Times Book Review'Una is an enchanting protagonist: intellectually curious, sensitive, imaginative and kind...a plot teeming with arresting events and provocative ideas.' Publishers Weekly
