It was Ian McGuire’s second novel, The North Water, longlisted for the Booker prize in 2016 and later adapted for television, that established his reputation for savage historical noir. A professor of American literature at the University of Manchester, McGuire specialises in the late 19th-century realist tradition; at its best his work blends the unsparing violence of Cormac McCarthy with a bleak lyricism reminiscent of Welsh poet RS Thomas.
Both The North Water, set onboard a whaling ship dispatched from Hull to Baffin Bay in 1859, and The Abstainer, inspired by the hanging of three Irish rebels in Manchester a decade later, probed the grisly underbelly of Victorian imperialism, harsh worlds where a “man’s life on its own is nothing much to talk about”. In White River Crossing, McGuire travels across the Atlantic and back another 100 years to the Prince of Wales Fort, a remote trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company in what is now northern Manitoba. Founded by royal charter in 1670 and granted sole right of trade and commerce across some 1.5m sq km of territory, the British venture was established to exploit the indigenous fur trade, but investors also hoped for other profitable discoveries, particularly silver and gold.
