Showing results by author "Jeremy Page" in All Categories

The worlds of ocean and ice were meeting in a frontier of rage, as if the earth had torn in two along this line. This was a place, if there ever was a place, where you could disappear. The year is 1845, and young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an expedition to the Arctic in the hope of finding the remains of the by-now-extinct Great Auk, a large flightless bird of mythical status. Eliot joins a hunting ship, but the crew and the passengers are not what they seem.

Perhaps I would be too late to save them. The last dozen had been spotted on a remote island in the North Atlantic, on a bare ledge of rock, but it was already rumoured the final breeding pair had been killed - their skins sold to private collectors - and the single egg between them needlessly crushed. These were only rumours, I kept telling myself. But as I set out for the Liverpool docks, on that breezy April morning in 1845, I couldn't help hoping that I might be able to reach them in time, the last of the birds.

A field, a perfect morning, and a family destroyed in a single moment. After the death of his only daughter and the dissolution of his marriage, Guy is left alone and searching for answers. He sets out to sea on an old Dutch barge—acquired on a whim—that has now become his home. Every night Guy writes the imagined diary of the man he should be—and the family he should have. Every morning he wakes to the knowledge of all he has lost.