Fans pick 100 books like The Voyage of the Narwhal

I read this book the summer before I returned to university to complete my B.A. Thompson’s book convinced me that one of my first loves, the study of history, was where I wanted to be.

It is a ground-breaking study of people overlooked, ignored, and condescended to by historians, whose lives were changed by early forms of industrialization in late 18th and early 19th-century England. Thompson treats these people as active agents in shaping their worlds socially, economically, and politically, and he takes their role in “making class” and political activism seriously.

It is also beautifully written, and the depth of his research sets a high standard for subsequent generations of historians.

It’s hard to know quite where to begin with this book–there is so much to love.

This book tells the story of the Great Migration of African American people out of the South across the United States to Chicago, New York, California, and beyond; it transforms and fills in a crucial part of American history that every American should know to understand our present day. But for me, what I love most starts with the way Isabel Wilkerson cares for people’s stories. 

Wilkerson tells this decades-long, sweeping, under-told story through individual stories that are so detailed and compelling, so thoroughly contextualized with historical research, that I was completely enmeshed in these people’s lives, their struggles, their loves, and their feelings. I cared. In the years since I read it, stories from the book often come to my mind, teaching and guiding me like the words of a beloved relative. 

I’m a fan of speculative fiction and those rare novels set on Svalbard. This novel satisfies both cravings. 

Spurred by a desire to change his life, Jack Miller joins an expedition to northern Svalbard in January 1937 and is abandoned by his companions as the dark season approaches. Paver mines the psychological page-turning quality of a great ghost story with beautiful language and palpable descriptions of the Arctic landscape and its natural wonders. 

Left alone, Jack must deal with loneliness and isolation and their effects on his psyche. It’s hard to avoid such themes when you’re dealing with an extreme setting like the High Arctic, especially during the months of total darkness, but they are themes that make me think about the great philosophical questions such as how one finds meaning in life.

One of the first contemporary novels to take climate change seriously, and still one of the best.

The plot concerns a woman who finds millions of Monarch butterflies living in the valley near her Tennessee home, only to discover once scientists arrive that they have been driven from their native home farther south by the accelerating pace of global warming.

The novel takes a strong political stance but still manages to avoid becoming didactic, a real achievement when you consider how polarizing a subject climate change has become.

Alexievich is equal parts therapist, poet, and historian. She elicits deeply personal memories through oral histories that she artfully weaves into a portrait of vast events. The accounts gathered in this history of the Soviet Union’s ten-year war against Afghanistan give voice to soldiers’ memories of the country they were asked to defeat, which defeated them instead, and parents’ memories of sons killed or otherwise destroyed in battle. I read this book after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which initiated an equally brutal, mindless, and losing war, and I find sad new relevance in this book as I learn of Russian soldiers being shipped home from Ukraine in the same kinds of zinc coffins that gives this book its title.

I’d rank this novel in my top five of all time, not just as a great survival story.

This book is a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel set partly in Antarctica, a meditation on human existence, and a page-turner with keen attention to beautiful writing. Its characters grapple with essential, existential questions such as: How are we connected to the world? What happens when those last connections are broken? What is the nature of loneliness, of love? Is survival alone enough reason for living? 

I’ve read this novel several times, and though I know the arc of the story and the fate of its characters, I come away each time with insights into what it means to be alive. A bonus: it’s one of the few novels I know of set in Antarctica. 

I’m obsessed with the story of S. A. Andrée and his ill-fated attempt to sail over the North Pole in the balloon Eagle in 1897. My bookshelf is jammed with non-fictional accounts of this flight—and the tragedy that befell the three men aboard.

Because much is unknown about exactly what happened to these men, Sundman created this fictional story of the flight, from its takeoff on Danes Island on the western side of Svalbard to the balloon’s crash onto the ice near the North Pole to the men’s perilous journey over ice ending on Kvitøya (White Island) on the eastern side of Svalbard. Doubly tragic: they were so painfully close to salvation but unable to cross the sea to a more hospitable landing site on Svalbard.

I’m also incredibly curious about why explorers risk their lives for uncertain gain. This novel helps reveal the daring but also narcissistic motivations of… show more.

I enjoy the “based on a true story” feel of this novel, even though it’s purely a product of Harding’s imagination. A historical novel set in 1616, the story centers upon a headstrong English whaler—Thomas Cave—who, on a bet, stays behind alone on an Arctic island in the Svalbard archipelago to endure the dark season. More threatening than carving out an existence in a forbidding environment is the effect of isolation on Cave, whom we see through excerpts from his diary. 

I hadn’t realized until I wrote this list how possessed I am by novels set in extreme environments and also—not surprisingly—ones whose themes arise from that obsession: the nature of loneliness and the effects of isolation. I’m a fan of layered narratives as well—akin to the kind of framed narrative found in Heart of Darkness.

Cave’s diary entries are embedded within the voice of a first-person narrator who… show more.

Barry Lopez was a nature writer and environmentalist.

He died on Christmas day 2020, and although we are fortunate to have his valedictory book Horizon, published when his traveling days were pretty well behind him, Arctic Dreams is the real deal, with Lopez as raconteur, but practitioner too, thoroughly in his element.

Lopez writes about exploration and the aurora, animals and the weather, ice and myth and survival and joy. He’s effortless. You’ll learn more than you knew there was to know about the high north, and the pleasure is in the learning.

If you must cut to the chase with these five books, Arctic Dreams is the book, because Barry Lopez got things right.

As well as the characters who populate nautical stories and the sea itself, ships have such a vivid voice.

This non-fiction book follows HMS Erebus from her early journey to Antarctica to her eventual disappearance in the Canadian Arctic. I have a small obsession with polar exploration and this book captures the drama, the terror, and the mystery of it.

Michael Palin’s sensitivity to the historical issues and the real figures is very moving, especially the moment when the primary documents stop and all that is left to tell these men’s tales is a note in a desolate cairn.

I want to also sneakily recommend AMC’s adaptation of Dan Simmons’s The Terror, a TV show based on these events, which has some of my favourite writing in any piece of media.