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When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781472106575

Price: £8.99

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Cal lives with his parents on Loyalty Island. Each winter, Cal’s father – a captain of the island’s trawling fleet – sets sail for Alaska; and though Cal is still too young to join them, he is old enough to know that everything depends on the fate of those few boats, thousands of miles north.

When the fleet’s owner dies, not only is the town’s livelihood threatened, but so too is Cal’s family. With winter fast approaching, and the fleet on the brink of extinction, Cal starts to suspect that his parents both have secrets to hide. Plagued by doubt, his loyalties strained and his moral compass thrown wildly off course, Cal is forced to make a brave and terrible choice.

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Reviews

Dybek has a gift for the atmospheric.
The New Yorker
An authentic, atmospheric, coming-of-age story with a painful dilemma . . . A terrific debut.
C. J. Box
Complex and suspenseful . . . A genuine tragedy-powerful, mythic, unforgettable.
Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule
Dybek brings serious talent to bear... [The novel] finishes on a powerful note of moral murkiness... Evocative.
New York Times
An engrossing and exacting moral thriller.
Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
A thrilling yarn, delivered as if by a scarred man by the consoling light of a fire.
The Economist
A book to watch.
O: The Oprah Magazine
Finely crafted . . . a taut novel juggling the sometimes conflicting impulses to do the moral thing, and to protect those we love
Los Angeles Times
This is a book about transitions, and revelations, and the thin line between acting out of fear, and out of out of a sense of morality . . . Dybek is a clean and stripped-down stylist, striking a delicate balance between ambiguity and life-changing clarity.
Los Angeles Times
Dybek has created a superbly orchestrated and soulful drama of loyalty to family and an imperiled way of life and the fathomless forces that make a good man go bad.
Booklist
[An] engrossing, often haunting thriller.
Washington Independent Review of Books