“‘And now here I was, an accidental whaler, who knew nothing of whales, except the festive spout in the distance and the unreal immensity of a sperm whale’s corpse on a windy shore.”
So thinks the heroine of Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle, from the deck of the whaler Nimrod, where she has enlisted as a sailor. A teenage orphan from coastal Kent, where she grew up swimming with seals and dolphins, she’s escaped a half-starved life as a factory worker by dressing as a boy to go to sea. Now she finds herself in a crew captained by a morose, reclusive, peg-legged man, who is monomaniacally obsessed with finding and killing the great white whale which maimed him. As many readers will already have guessed, the unlucky Ishmaelle has landed herself in a retelling of Moby-Dick.
