About The Last Whaler:

Have you ever dreamed of sailing along Arctic shores, witnessing the unspoiled beauty of massive glaciers or the spectacle of a glacier calving? Or exploring an old whaling station whose ghosts include the bones of hundreds of beluga whales? Or navigating through a field of seemingly impenetrable ice? All these sights and more will be featured in a presentation by Cynthia Reeves, a Maine fiction writer who will share highlights of her Arctic travels and inspirations for her latest novel, The Last Whaler. 

Set against the haunting beauty and brutal extremes of the Arctic, The Last Whaler is a gripping tale of survival, love, and loss. The novel follows Tor Handeland, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, who are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway. Beyond enduring the Arctic winter’s twenty-four-hour night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold as well as Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy. The Last Whaler is an elegiac meditation on the resilience of the human spirit, the enduring power of love and remembrance, and the fragile threads that connect us to each other and, especially, to our environment.

About Cynthia:

The Last Whaler reflects Cynthia Reeves’s love of the Arctic, inspired by her 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition that circumnavigated Svalbard and by three subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen. Reeves’s novel-in-stories Falling Through the New World (2024) won Gold Wake Press’s Spring 2023 contest, and her novella Badlands (2007) won Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her award-winning short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared widely and earned numerous Pushcart nominations. A Hawthornden Fellow and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she resides in Camden, Maine.