A young Norwegian leaves the island of his birth at the end of the age of sail. He carries a sea-chest, a confirmation Bible, a borrowed knife, and a promise to the girl he means to marry. Over seven years and as many voyages he will find out what the horizon takes and what it gives back — and he will come home carrying something he cannot yet name, not even to himself.
Book I · chapters
The watches
Prologue
For Those Who Sailed in Silence
*For those who loved in times that had no word for it,* *and for the ones they could not say.*
Vestbø
The morning he left home, the sea was a line without weather at the far end of his father's fields.
Hebburn
A tug brought them up the Tyne on a Thursday forenoon, with the city showing itself by slow degrees through the coal-smoke.
Homecoming
They came into Stavangerfjord on the twenty-first of December at first light, with the mountains standing sharp-edged and black against a sky that was still more night than…
Winter
Christmas passed quietly at Vestbø, with only the three of them at the table and the weather closing in from the northwest.
The Upper Field
The letter had come on a Thursday and he had not opened it until his sons were both out of the house. He had learned in thirty-six years as a father that the thinking he needed to…