Iida Turpeinen’s ‘Beasts of the Sea’; Frode Grytten’s ‘The Ferryman and His Wife’

As the cold descends on Washington, we’re turning up the heat with two Scandinavian novels set at sea, from the fjords of Norway to imperial Helsinki.

Sea monsters: a novel

Ida Turpinen, trans. David Haxton (Little, Brown & Company, 288 pages, $28, November 2025)

Edda Turpinen’s first novel, Sea animalsand it has already earned its place in the canon of great climate literature. First published in Finland in 2023, the book topped the country’s bestseller lists and received translation rights into 28 languages. The American version is scheduled to hit shelves next week.

Sea animals It is a work of historical fiction. A grim story of man-made destruction spanning four centuries. The novel begins and ends with modern-day vignettes at the Natural History Museum in Helsinki, where visitors marvel at the skeleton of an extinct species known as the Steller’s sea cow. Torpinen then takes the reader back to 1741, when Finland was part of the Russian Empire, in the first of three long historical chapters.

In that year, Catherine the Great sent an expedition led by Captain-Commander. Vitus Bering tries to reach the Americas. Bering takes a naturalist named Georg Wilhelm Steller with him to record the plant and animal life 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 who died of scurvy.

For his part, Stiller discovered the marine mammals that now bear his name. Hunting dugongs becomes an essential source of nutrition for the rest of the crew before they can return to Russia. To sailors, “sea cow meat looks like manna from heaven,” Torpinen writes.

A century later, the story revolves around Sitka, Alaska, where Governor Johan Hampus Furuhjelm oversees a dwindling Russian imperial presence in the region. The sea cow, which “spent thousands of years doing very little except grazing” before becoming a food source, is now extinct, with a caveat — that word does not yet exist in the human lexicon. Extinction is a controversial idea put forward by some scientists but dismissed by many others as a “fantastic atheist idea.”

Furuhjelm is desperate to find the remains of a sea cow to bolster Alaska’s reputation as the fur trade falters, itself an economic trend driven by human extortion of the natural world. This chapter is full of colonial irony. According to Furuhjelm’s wife, Russia’s goal was “to bring the colony into the realm of human laws, to bring in culture and education and to make Alaska a primitive and suitable place.” Eventually, natives hired by Furuhjelm found the skeletal remains of the dugongs and brought them to the governor, who sent them to Helsinki. A few years later, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and pioneering Finnish painter, Hilda Olsson, helped document the sea cow forever.

The last historical part of Sea animals The film is set in Helsinki in the 1950s, when Finland became an independent country and extinction became a matter of scientific consensus. Torpinen traces the skeleton’s journey to the museum where it still hangs today, a project made possible by restorer John Gronvall. Torpinen writes that his exhibition on disappearing species “forced humans to look at themselves in the mirror.”

Sea animals It bends genre in multiple ways. Torpainen bases her novel on documented historical events, but she “took the liberty” to use her “imagination” to craft elements of the story, including interpersonal dynamics, dialogue, and areas that were lacking in information, she wrote in her acknowledgment. The historical sections are interspersed with scientific facts and figures that reflect her background as a researcher.

Torpinen ends the book by thanking “the species that were declared extinct while this novel was being written,” which, by her count, number about 400 species. And remember the sea cow’s remaining endangered relatives, such as the dugongs of the Great Barrier Reef. Her plea to care about these animals is another reminder of that Sea animals It is much closer to history than pure fantasy – and that because of the endless spiral of human greed, the fate of the sea cow can befall any living being.Allison Meekm

The Mariner and his Wife: A Novel

Freud Greiten, trans. Alison McCullough (Algonquin Books, 176 pages, $17.99, November 2025)

Halfway through Frode Grytten The ferry owner and his wifeNiels Vik, the central character, recalls a conversation he had years ago with a former midwife who was once a regular passenger on his boat. She became ill, near death, and decided to burn the rest of her life in her backyard. As the couple looked at the flames sweeping through the property that once made up her home, she said: “Oh, how foolish it is to have to depend on others.”

It is a striking, even comical observation, not least because it is the antithesis of what Greiten’s novel stands for. If anything, The ferry owner and his wife It 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 last day of his life. He wakes up as usual before dawn on the Norwegian coast, before heading to a ferry – that “heart, with its strong and elastic muscles, that has worked under it all these years.” For decades, Nils has created a “little waiting room in time” for communities along the straits, shepherding them through everything from mundane commutes to harrowing life moments. Now, he embarks on one final journey, drawing on his old records as he seeks to “pull a thread through time” and remember the passengers whose lives were intertwined with his own.

As Nils reconsiders his path, these individuals emerge from his memory, from the troubled teenager who saw his boat as a refuge to the lonely farmer who hired Nils to take him into town on weekends in the hopes of finding a wife. As Niels takes one traveler after another, his thoughts often turn to Marta, his late wife, whose love shaped every aspect of his life.

Grytten has long been widely read in Scandinavia, however The ferry owner and his wifewhich won the Norwegian Brigg Prize, is his English language debut. The novel, written in simple prose and translated by Alison McCullough, fits neatly into the stereotypes of Norwegian literature – which, as writer Edda Lodimel Tvedt writes, is often reduced to “simplicity and melancholy, closeness to nature, softness, and modesty.” Indeed, on the surface, Gretton’s work is not unlike that of John Foss, his fellow Nobel laureate, who was preoccupied with many of these same themes. But if Foss’s work is more formally daring, Grettin’s is distinguished by its warmth, its unexpected specificity, and its deep interest in the details of everyday life.Chloe Hadavas

November releases, in a nutshell

Salman Rushdie returns with… Eleven o’clocka quintet of cautionary tales covering England, India, and the United States. in Silver bookOlivia Laing tells a fictionalized account of the months leading up to the murder of Italian writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Journalist George Packer spins dystopian fiction Emergencya political tale set in the aftermath of imperial collapse. The sentient wind plays the central character in English author Sarah Hall’s novel Helm. Oyinkan Braithwaite Cursed girls Weaves a multi-generational story in Lagos caught between the past and the future.

A woman’s pent-up anger comes to the surface over the course of one evening in Dutch writer Viola van de Sandt’s debut, Dinner party. In the novel by Korean writer Solmi Pak, Petty lies(Translated by Sarah Liu), four characters trapped in a cycle of cruelty and guilt. A journey through Spain, Cuba, and Key West reveals family secrets in Cuban author Mirta Augito’s book Deeper than the ocean. Hervé Le Tellier seeks to uncover the history of the young French resistance fighter Name on the wallTranslated by Adriana Hunter. And Brian Washington Balavera finalist for the National Book Award, explores the fraught mother-son relationship between Houston and Tokyo.the chapter