Beasts of the Sea
On sale
23rd October 2025
Price: £24.99
“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
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
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Reviews
A gorgeous, thought-provoking book about the consequences of the human exploration of the natural world. Its narrative moves through lives and times, with sailors, hunters, naturalists and artists all playing their part in the death and life of creatures that we're still lucky to know, and others that have been lost. In David Hackston's beautiful translation both humans and animals spring to vivid life on the page, and ask us to pay attention to history, and to the world around us
A wonderfully evocative account of the discovery, destruction and resurrection of a near-mythic sea monster that even now seems to evade our examining eyes - perhaps out of our own guilt. IIda Turpeinen's novel is almost Shakespearean in its drama and its set-pieces, shifting to and fro in time and space, peopled with vivid characters and their fates; with beings, both human and non-human, caught up in this beautifully written narrative, as deep and profound as the sea itself
Mesmerising. Near to mythic. This profound and moving novel of lost histories and lives held me captured in its spell
A sprawling, seething epic which intertwines the mysteries of the natural world with their destruction when myth and man collide. Beasts of the Sea is a delicately woven tale of exploration and exploitation; a sharp cry to protect what is precious in the world before it vanishes