An arctic adventure story fueled by obsession, passion, and gothic influence, The Collector of Lost Things is a gripping literary suspense novel.
The worlds of ocean and ice were meeting in a frontier of rage, as if the earth had torn in two along this line. This was a place, if there ever was a place, where you could disappear…
The year is 1845, and young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an expedition to the Arctic in the hope of finding the remains of the by-now-extinct Great Auk, a large flightless bird of mythical status. Eliot joins a hunting ship, but the crew and the passengers are not what they seem. Caught in the web of relationships on board, Eliot struggles to understand the motivations of the sociopathic Captain Sykes; the silent first mate, French; the flamboyant, laudanum-addicted Bletchley; and most importantly of all, Bletchley's beautiful but strange "cousin" Clara.
As the ship moves further and further into the wilds of the Arctic Sea, Eliot clings to what he believes in, desperate to save Clara but irrevocably drawn back into a past that haunts him—and a present that confronts him with myriad dangers.
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“Page’s maritime adventure pays tribute, in equal parts, to both philosophy and the environment…Saxby’s voyage is a multilayered, often tortured exploration of the inner workings of one man’s soul and spirit as he grapples with his own past, his weirdly creepy shipmates, and man’s violent encroachment on the natural world. In addition to the haunting, gothic-tinged narrative arc, recommend this for Page’s plaintive descriptions of the starkly bleak and beautiful Arctic.”
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