As the coolness settles over Washington, we’re turning up the hygge with two Scandinavian novels set at sea, from the fjords of Norway to imperial-era Helsinki.
Beasts of the Sea: A Novel
Iida Turpeinen, trans. David Hackston (Little, Brown and Firm, 288 pp., $28, November 2025)
Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel, Beasts of the Sea, has already secured its spot within the canon of nice local weather literature. First printed in Finland in 2023, the ebook topped bestseller lists within the nation and earned translation rights in 28 languages. The U.S. version is about to hit cabinets subsequent week.
Beasts of the Sea is a piece of historic fiction; a grim story of synthetic destruction that spans 4 centuries. The novel begins and ends with temporary modern-day vignettes at Helsinki’s Pure Historical past Museum, the place guests marvel at a skeleton of an extinct species often known as Steller’s sea cow. Then, Turpeinen whisks the reader again to 1741, when Finland was a part of the Russian Empire, for the primary of three prolonged historic chapters.
That yr, Catherine the Nice dispatches an expedition led by Capt. Cmdr. Vitus Bering to attempt to attain the Americas. Bering takes with him a naturalist named Georg Wilhelm Steller to document plant and animal life that they uncover alongside the way in which. The crew by no means reaches the Alaskan mainland and is as a substitute stranded within the Aleutian Islands after a shipwreck. Bering is certainly one of dozens to die of scurvy.
Steller, for his half, discovers the marine mammal that now bears his title. Looking sea cows turns into a necessary supply of nourishment for the remaining crew earlier than they’re able to make it again to Russia. To the sailors, “the ocean cow’s flesh looks like manna from heaven,” Turpeinen writes.
A century later, the story pivots to Sitka, Alaska, the place Gov. Johan Hampus Furuhjelm oversees Russia’s waning imperial presence within the territory. By now, the ocean cow, which “spent millennia doing little or no besides grazing” earlier than changing into a meals supply, has gone extinct, with a caveat—that phrase doesn’t but exist within the human lexicon. Extinction is a controversial concept floated by some scientists however dismissed by many others as “a outstanding, godless notion.”
Furuhjelm is determined to seek out the stays of a sea cow to spice up Alaska’s status because the fur commerce flounders, itself an financial pattern pushed by human extortion of the pure world. This chapter is rife with colonial derision; in keeping with Furuhjelm’s spouse, Russia’s purpose is to “deliver the colony into the realm of the legal guidelines of man, to deliver tradition and schooling and make Alaska a prim and correct place.” Ultimately, Indigenous individuals employed by Furuhjelm discover remnants of sea cow skeletons and produce them to the governor, who sends them to Helsinki. A couple of years later, Russia sells Alaska to the US, and a pioneering Finnish girl illustrator, Hilda Olson, helps doc the ocean cow for perpetuity.
The ultimate historic chunk of Beasts of the Sea takes place in Helsinki within the Nineteen Fifties, as soon as Finland is an unbiased nation and extinction has change into the scientific consensus. Turpeinen traces the skeleton’s journey to the museum the place it nonetheless hangs right now, a venture made attainable by restorer John Grönvall. His exhibit on disappeared species “pressured people to take a look at themselves within the mirror,” Turpeinen writes.
Beasts of the Sea is genre-bending in a number of methods. Turpeinen bases her novel on documented historic occasions, however she has “taken the freedom” of utilizing her “creativeness” to craft components of the story, together with interpersonal dynamics, dialogue, and areas the place data was missing, she writes in her acknowledgments. Interspersed all through the historic sections are scientific info and figures, reflecting her background as a researcher.
Turpeinen ends the ebook by thanking “the species which were declared extinct throughout the writing of this novel,” which, by her depend, quantity round 400. She mentions the ocean cow’s remaining endangered family, such because the dugong of the Nice Barrier Reef. Her plea to concentrate to those animals is yet one more reminder that Beasts of the Sea is way nearer to historiography than pure fiction—and that, because of the infinite spiral of human greed, the ocean cow’s destiny may but befall any residing creature.—Allison Meakem
The Ferryman and His Spouse: A Novel
Frode Grytten, trans. Alison McCullough (Algonquin Books, 176 pp., $17.99, November 2025)
Halfway by Frode Grytten’s The Ferryman and His Spouse, the central character, Nils Vik, recollects a dialog he had years in the past with a former midwife who had as soon as been an everyday passenger on his boat. She had fallen sick and, nearing demise, determined to burn the remnants of her life in her yard. Because the pair regarded on on the flames engulfing the possessions that had as soon as made up her dwelling, she stated, “Oh, the idiocy of getting to rely on others.”
It’s a hanging, even comical, comment—not least as a result of it’s the antithesis of what Grytten’s novel stands for. If something, The Ferryman and His Spouse is an ode to the required frictions of group, love, and relationships, from the fleeting to probably the most intimate.
The novel takes place over the course of what Nils is aware of would be the last day of his life. He awakens as ordinary earlier than dawn on the Norwegian coast, earlier than heading to his ferry—that “coronary heart, with its sturdy, ropy muscle tissues, which for all these years had labored beneath him.” For many years, Nils had created a “little ready room in time” for the communities alongside the fjords, shepherding them on the whole lot from mundane commutes to harrowing life moments. Now, he embarks on one final journey, counting on his outdated logbooks as he seeks to “pull a thread by time” and recall the passengers whose lives had intertwined along with his personal.
As Nils revisits his route, these people emerge from his reminiscence, from the troubled teen who noticed his boat as a refuge to the lonely farmer who employed Nils to take him to the town on the weekends within the hopes of discovering a spouse. And as Nils picks up one passenger after one other, his ideas flip usually to Marta, his late spouse, whose love formed each side of his life.
Grytten has lengthy been extensively learn in Scandinavia, however The Ferryman and His Spouse, which gained Norway’s Brage Prize, is his English language debut. Written in spare prose translated by Alison McCullough, the novel suits neatly into stereotypes of Norwegian literature—which, essayist Ida Lødemel Tvedt has written, is usually diminished to “minimalism and melancholy, closeness to nature, mellowness, humility.” Certainly, on the floor, Grytten’s work will not be dissimilar to that of Jon Fosse, his Nobel Prize-winning compatriot, who’s preoccupied with many of those identical themes. But when Fosse’s work is extra formally daring, Grytten’s stands aside for its sudden heat and specificity, its deep take care of the trivialities of on a regular basis life.—Chloe Hadavas
November Releases, in Temporary
Salman Rushdie returns with The Eleventh Hour, a quintet of cautionary tales spanning England, India, and the US. In The Silver E-book, Olivia Laing fictionalizes the months main as much as the homicide of Italian author and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Journalist George Packer pivots to dystopian fiction with The Emergency, a political fable set within the aftermath of imperial collapse. A sentient wind stars because the central character in English writer Sarah Corridor’s Helm. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters weaves a multigenerational story in a Lagos caught between the previous and future.
A girl’s suppressed rage involves the floor over the course of 1 night in Dutch author Viola van de Sandt’s debut, The Dinner Social gathering. In Korean writer Sulmi Bak’s epistolary novel, Petty Lies, translated by Sarah Lyo, 4 characters are trapped in a cycle of cruelty and guilt. A journey throughout Spain, Cuba, and Key West finds household secrets and techniques in Cuban writer Mirta Ojito’s Deeper Than the Ocean. Hervé Le Tellier seeks to uncover the historical past of a younger French resistance fighter in The Identify on the Wall, translated by Adriana Hunter. And Bryan Washington’s Palaver, a finalist for the Nationwide E-book Award, explores a fraught mother-son relationship between Houston and Tokyo.—CH
