As the chill settles over Washington, we’re turning up the hygge with two Scandinavian novels set at sea, from the fjords of Norway to imperial-era Helsinki.
Beasts of the Sea: A Novel
Iida Turpeinen, trans. David Hackston (Little, Brown and Company, 288 pp., $28, November 2025)
The book cover for Beast os the Sa by Iida Turpeinen
Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel, Beasts of the Sea, has already secured its spot in the canon of great climate literature. First published in Finland in 2023, the book topped bestseller lists in the country and earned translation rights in 28 languages. The U.S. edition is set to hit shelves next week.
Beasts of the Sea is a work of historical fiction; a grim story of man-made destruction that spans four centuries. The novel begins and ends with brief modern-day vignettes at Helsinki’s Natural History Museum, where visitors marvel at a skeleton of an extinct species known as Steller’s sea cow. Then, Turpeinen whisks the reader back to 1741, when Finland was part of the Russian Empire, for the first of three lengthy historical chapters.
That year, Catherine the Great dispatches an expedition led by Capt. Cmdr. Vitus Bering to try to reach the Americas. Bering takes with him a naturalist named Georg Wilhelm Steller to record plant and animal life that they discover along the way. The crew never reaches the Alaskan mainland and is instead stranded in the Aleutian Islands after a shipwreck. Bering is one of dozens to die of scurvy.
Steller, for his part, discovers the marine mammal that now bears his name. Hunting sea cows becomes an essential source of nourishment for the remaining crew before they are able to make it back to Russia. To the sailors, “the sea cow’s flesh seems like manna from heaven,” Turpeinen writes.
A century later, the story pivots to Sitka, Alaska, where Gov. Johan Hampus Furuhjelm oversees Russia’s waning imperial presence in the territory. By now, the sea cow, which “spent millennia doing very little except grazing” before becoming a food source, has gone extinct, with a caveat—that word does not yet exist in the human lexicon. Extinction is a controversial idea floated by some scientists but dismissed by many others as “a remarkable, godless notion.”
Furuhjelm is desperate to find the remains of a sea cow to boost Alaska’s reputation as the fur trade flounders, itself an economic trend driven by human extortion of the natural world. This chapter is rife with colonial derision; according to Furuhjelm’s wife, Russia’s aim is to “bring the colony into the realm of the laws of man, to bring culture and education and make Alaska a prim and proper place.” Eventually, Indigenous people hired by Furuhjelm find remnants of sea cow skeletons and bring them to the governor, who sends them to Helsinki. A few years later, Russia sells Alaska to the United States, and a pioneering Finnish woman illustrator, Hilda Olson, helps document the sea cow for perpetuity.
The final historical chunk of Beasts of the Sea takes place in Helsinki in the 1950s, once Finland is an independent country and extinction has become the scientific consensus. Turpeinen traces the skeleton’s journey to the museum where it still hangs today, a project made possible by restorer John Grönvall. His exhibit on disappeared species “forced humans to look at themselves in the mirror,” Turpeinen writes.
Beasts of the Sea is genre-bending in multiple ways. Turpeinen bases her novel on documented historical events, but she has “taken the liberty” of using her “imagination” to craft elements of the story, including interpersonal dynamics, dialogue, and areas where information was lacking, she writes in her acknowledgments. Interspersed throughout the historical sections are scientific facts and figures, reflecting her background as a researcher.
Turpeinen ends the book by thanking “the species that have been declared extinct during the writing of this novel,” which, by her count, number around 400. She mentions the sea cow’s remaining endangered relatives, such as the dugong of the Great Barrier Reef. Her plea to pay attention to these animals is yet another reminder that Beasts of the Sea is far closer to historiography than pure fiction—and that, due to the endless spiral of human greed, the sea cow’s fate could yet befall any living creature.—Allison Meakem
The Ferryman and His Wife: A Novel
Frode Grytten, trans. Alison McCullough (Algonquin Books, 176 pp., $17.99, November 2025)
The book cover for The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten
Midway through Frode Grytten’s The Ferryman and His Wife, the central character, Nils Vik, recalls a conversation he had years ago with a former midwife who had once been a regular passenger on his boat. She had fallen ill and, nearing death, decided to burn the remnants of her life in her backyard. As the pair looked on at the flames engulfing the possessions that had once made up her home, she said, “Oh, the idiocy of having to depend on others.”
It’s a striking, even comical, remark—not least because it’s the antithesis of what Grytten’s novel stands for. If anything, The Ferryman and His Wife is an ode to the necessary frictions of community, love, and relationships, from the fleeting to the most intimate.
The novel takes place over the course of what Nils knows will be the final day of his life. He awakens as usual before daybreak on the Norwegian coast, before heading to his ferry—that “heart, with its strong, ropy muscles, which for all these years had worked beneath him.” For decades, Nils had created a “little waiting room in time” for the communities along the fjords, shepherding them on everything from mundane commutes to harrowing life moments. Now, he embarks on one last journey, relying on his old logbooks as he seeks to “pull a thread through time” and recall the passengers whose lives had intertwined with his own.
As Nils revisits his route, these individuals emerge from his memory, from the troubled teen who saw his boat as a refuge to the lonely farmer who hired Nils to take him to the city on the weekends in the hopes of finding a wife. And as Nils picks up one passenger after another, his thoughts turn often to Marta, his late wife, whose love shaped every facet of his life.
Grytten has long been widely read in Scandinavia, but The Ferryman and His Wife, which won Norway’s Brage Prize, is his English language debut. Written in spare prose translated by Alison McCullough, the novel fits neatly into stereotypes of Norwegian literature—which, essayist Ida Lødemel Tvedt has written, is often reduced to “minimalism and melancholy, closeness to nature, mellowness, humility.” Indeed, on the surface, Grytten’s work is not dissimilar to that of Jon Fosse, his Nobel Prize-winning compatriot, who is preoccupied with many of these same themes. But if Fosse’s work is more formally daring, Grytten’s stands apart for its unexpected warmth and specificity, its deep care for the minutiae of everyday life.—Chloe Hadavas
November Releases, in Brief
Salman Rushdie returns with The Eleventh Hour, a quintet of cautionary tales spanning England, India, and the United States. In The Silver Book, Olivia Laing fictionalizes the months leading up to the murder of Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Journalist George Packer pivots to dystopian fiction with The Emergency, a political fable set in the aftermath of imperial collapse. A sentient wind stars as the central character in English author Sarah Hall’s Helm. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters weaves a multigenerational story in a Lagos caught between the past and future.
A woman’s suppressed rage comes to the surface over the course of one evening in Dutch writer Viola van de Sandt’s debut, The Dinner Party. In Korean author Sulmi Bak’s epistolary novel, Petty Lies, translated by Sarah Lyo, four characters are trapped in a cycle of cruelty and guilt. A journey across Spain, Cuba, and Key West unearths family secrets in Cuban author Mirta Ojito’s Deeper Than the Ocean. Hervé Le Tellier seeks to uncover the history of a young French resistance fighter in The Name on the Wall, translated by Adriana Hunter. And Bryan Washington’s Palaver, a finalist for the National Book Award, explores a fraught mother-son relationship between Houston and Tokyo.—CH
