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Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. More about this author >
Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.
With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.
North Sun by Ethan Rutherford is a transformative journey on the whaling ship Esther—a magnificent voyage on crystalline prose, a seaman’s tale of whales and hybrid spirits and boys who become men, a revisit to the first magical awakening to the power of story and Melville’s echoing call to “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” It is also a siren warning about the aftermath of human actions on the natural world.
Ethan Rutherford at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
