Dominique Fortier

Translated by: Rhonda Mullins

From the author of Pale Shadows, a delicate reimagining of the relationships that created the great American novel

While writing Moby Dick, Herman Melville meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, an encounter that alters the course of his life and his novel. From this true story of friendship, only a handful of Melville’s letters remain. Inspired by the surviving correspondence, Dominique Fortier imagines the passionate relationship between the two authors: their desires, their domestic arrangements, Melville’s struggle to write, and Hawthorne’s powerful hold over Melville.

Melville’s story is interspersed with the frantic scribbling of Lizzie, his wife, her words flying onto the page, her stream of consciousness ideas and talents not given the same time and space to develop as her husband’s.

A third exchange unfolds between Fortier as she is writing the book and a companion who is half real, half imagined, a man she says is primarily a poem. Forming a bridge between past and present, Fortier’s novel braids together these three parts, telling the story of the most beautiful of shipwrecks, Moby Dick.