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Title: The North Water

Author: Ian McGuire

Narrator: John Keating

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-02-16

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 18 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

A 19th-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp, and highly original tale that grips like a thriller.

Behold the man: Stinking, drunk, brutal and bloodthirsty, Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaling ship bound for the hunting waters of the Arctic Circle. Also aboard is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money, and no better option than to embark as ship's medic on this ill-fated voyage.

In India during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which a man can stoop and imagined he'd find respite on the Volunteer, but now, trapped in the wooden belly of the ship with Drax, he encounters pure evil and is forced to act. 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.

Critic Reviews:

"Fast-paced, gripping. A tour de force of narrative tension and a masterful reconstruction of a lost world." (Hilary Mantel)

"Utterly convincing and compelling, remorselessly vivid and insidiously witty. A startling achievement." (Martin Amis)

Members Reviews:

gripping story. rivetingly told and written

Loved it. Couldn't turn it off. the narrator is fantastic and it is beautifully viscerally engaging

Good writing, believable characters and plot

Ian McGuire is a good writer. The story clips along, the characters are believable and the plot plausible. Enjoyed it.

Fast paced, rated 18+

Great writing, great performance, fast paced and graphic. Some chapters not for the faint hearted! Totally sucked me in.

needlessly horrific

A macho wet dream that didn't need to be written. It starts with the rape of a young child and goes downhill from there.

A glorious and disturbing assault on the senses

This is a brutal but magnificent tale set on a whaling ship in the 1850's and telling the tale of Patrick Sumner, an Irish surgeon with a dubious past, who plans to spend his voyage reading Homer and feeding his laudanum habit. His plans quickly unravel when a cabin boy is raped and murdered during the voyage. Sumner is not prepared to allow the wrong man hang for the crime and thus finds himself pitched against the harpoon man Henry Drax who must be by far the most honest and unrelentingly evil depiction of a psychopath ever described in fiction.

This book however, is not merely a thriller but is something that completely engulfs your senses. Not only do you see and hear the characters but you are also able to smell and taste the foul and corrupt stenches that emit from the wholesale butchery of animals and from the men themselves. It depicts the overwhelming desire to survive, where even a broken barrel will be reconstructed, rather than squandered, but also the despair of men who begin to realise there is no longer any hope. The hero of this story is not a brooding macho character but is nonetheless somebody who thrills you with the sheer tenacity of his spirit and the humanity of his actions.