Fiction: special features

A heartbreaking fictional elegy to one of the world's most iconic lost creatures, the Steller's Sea Cow

"A sprawling, seething epic" Lucy Steeds, winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

**"As deep and profound as the sea itself" Philip Hoare

1741. The crew of Vitus Bering's ill-starred Great Northern Expedition are shipwrecked off a remote, uncharted island.** With no hope of rescue, they give in to despair. Until they discover the flesh of a huge marine mammal that feeds in herds on the kelp in the bay.

1859. The Russian colony of Alaska is on the brink of collapse. Governor Hampus Furuhjelm takes solace in the quest for a unique artefact: a complete skeleton of what is now known as Steller's Sea Cow, rumoured to have disappeared a hundred years before.

Even extinct, the sea cow will continue to shape lives and destinies, from the woman charged with sketching its likeness from its bones, to the expert egg restorer who will refurbish those same bones a century later.

A tribute to an iconic lost creature, and an adventure through three centuries of scientific exploration, Beasts of the Sea charts the unseen consequences of grand human ambitions and the urge to resurrect what we, in our ignorance, have destroyed.

Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, ranging from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.
Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.
Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.
In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

From the International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Cursed Bunny