Call Me Ishmaelle

“Ambitious, brave, and strange.” —Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan

From the NBCC-winning author, a subversive, rollicking, and feminist retelling of Moby Dick through the eyes of one inimitable woman.

I must work on a ship as a man…Yes, I must seek a new life, more adventurous than that of my fellows on this desolate salt marsh. I must find freedom on the seas.

One of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation, Xiaolu Guo is the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Nine Continents and a Granta Best Young British Novelist. In Call Me Ishmaelle, Guo turns Herman Melville’s masterpiece on its head with a modern feminist, diasporic sensibility.

1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca’s leg.

Built on the bones of Melville’s classic, Call Me Ishmaelle is a dynamic new tale, imbued with a diverse, swashbuckling crew—from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk—and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, man’s place among the animals, and the nature of home.