Moby Dick

‘Call me Ishmael’ Thus starts the greatest American novel. Melville said himself that he wanted to write ‘a mighty book about a mighty theme’ and so he did. It is a story of one man’s obsessive revenge-journey against the white whale, Moby Dick, who injured him in an earlier meeting. Woven into the story of the last journey of the Pequod is a mesh of philosophy, rumination, religion, history and a mass of information about whaling through the ages.

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You need the whole novel to experience the voyage with its excitements and lulls, to feel you’re along for the ride, carried along on the waves of Melville’s prose.

Ted Hodgkinson 

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