The Solitude of Thomas Cave Book

In 1616, as the last warm days dwindle in the north Atlantic, the men on an English whaling ship prepare to head back toward home. But there is one exception among them: the quiet, headstrong Thomas Cave. For Cave has bet the rest of the crew that he can spend a winter on this Arctic island. Alone.

His shipmates sail away, the days shorten, and the cold weather moves in. Thomas Cave faces months of darkness, ice, and blizzards. He has nothing to his name except his rations, shelter, and a journal—a record in case he doesn't survive to tell his story. But nothing so threatens the willful sailor as his own mind: he is haunted by the remembrances of another life and a lost love. From his post at the edge of the known world, Cave sees his own past, and begins to reflect on man's relationship with God and the wilderness.

A beautiful, ghostly tale, The Solitude of Thomas Cave brings us back to the beginning of the modern world, in a story infused with the violence, power and beauty that define both man and nature.

The New Yorker

This austere but atmospheric début novel tells the story of Thomas Cave, a taciturn seventeenth-century British whaler who accepts a bet to remain on an unexplored island in East Greenland for a year. It’s a place where one can “experience the most extreme cold and blizzard even at the height of August,” and where Cave’s shipmates are “touched with dread even when the sun shone.” Harding overreaches when she attempts to make Cave’s experiences emblematic of humankind’s predatory relationship with the natural world, but her accounts of Cave’s daily struggle for survival (even inside his tent “everything that does not face towards the fire is frozen”) are powerful, and she reveals myriad gradations of light and color in what first appears a blank and unchanging landscape.