Beasts of the Sea

Turpeinen’s fantastic debut interweaves the fate of an extinct aquatic species with the stories of the people who discovered and destroyed it. In 1741, naturalist George Steller finds a previously undocumented species of sea cow (a relative of the manatee) while sailing with a Russian expedition charting the Arctic coast. After their vessel founders, he and his shipmates take shelter on an uninhabited island, where they butcher the sea cows for food. Steller, fascinated by the huge and peaceful creatures, preserves a 25-foot-long skeleton for future study, but he’s forced to leave it behind while making his way back to civilization. Over the next three decades, the species is killed off, leaving knowledge of it scant until Aleutian hunters find a nearly complete skeleton in the mid-19th century. As Finnish zoologist Alexander von Nordmann assembles the bones, he tries to convince his fellow scientists that man, not nature, is causing mass extinction, and bucks convention by hiring a female artist, Hilda Olson, to document the skeleton in perfectly scaled, precisely rendered drawings. A century later, meticulous conservator John Grönvall prepares the skeleton for public display at the Finnish Museum of Zoology. Turpeinen matches the heights of Andrea Barrett with her detailed descriptions of the natural world and intimate character portraits, offering a vast sweep of evolutionary history shot through with impressionistic scenes, whether of Steller watching a sea cow play like a boisterous child or Olson mourning her tubercular father. This tour de force of science and storytelling is not to be missed. (Nov.)