FINALIST FOR THE GILLER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR FICTION
FINALIST FOR THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE FOR
BEST BOOK (CANADA & THE CARIBBEAN)
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2002
“Almost five hundred pages of effortless narrative, powered by indelible images of eternal polar ice and the birth of the twentieth century in teeming Manhattan, exert an inexorable pull.”
—Maclean’s
“A captivating narrative that delves into both the noble and the seedier aspects of the human need to discover and explore.… Johnston’s ability to illuminate historical settings and situations continues to grow with each book, and this powerful effort is his best to date.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The sustenance offered by The Navigator of New York is not easily found in these thin and knowing days.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Wayne Johnston’s new novel is chock-full of fine writing and intriguing historical detail.… Johnston has again proven himself a national treasure.”
—The London Free Press
“The book is an intricate blend of mystery, adventure and drama … a brilliant creative achievement … a compulsively readable work, rich in authentic details.”
—The Chronicle—Herald (Halifax)
“Material like this—with its tantalizing themes of truth, falsehood, ambition, envy, and the queasily shifting nature of reality—is pure gold for a fiction maker. In the hands of Newfoundland writer Wayne Johnston, it becomes a shape-shifting epic of magical proportions and dazzling complexity.… Some of the most powerful and imaginative writing being produced in English today.”
—Quill & Quire (starred review)
“The Navigator of New York is a morally complex novel that holds a telescope of themes: love and betrayal, honour and deception, truth and falsehood.… It is a major artistic achievement and confirms Johnston as one of the significant Canadian writers to mount the world literary stage in recent years.”
—The Record (Kitchener—Waterloo)
“Johnston has a gift for the vivid and meticulous recreation of lost times and places.… He navigates with the assurance of a born explorer.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“A huge and immensely readable novel about explorers of the landscape and the heart.”
—Elle Canada
“Beautiful [and] evocative.… Johnston is an accomplished storyteller, with a gift for both description and character, which he uses masterfully here.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Better than about ninety per cent of most contemporary fiction. Johnston is a great novelist in the making”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A remarkably good book.… It is a worthy successor to The Colony, and reinforces Johnston’s right to be considered one of the major figures in Canadian fiction.”
—The Independent (UK)
“Wayne Johnston … is redefining the historical novel.… [His] rendition of the obsession and self-serving dishonesty of the explorers, the sound and feel of life at the North Pole, a brand-new New York on the cusp of greatness, and a young man having his life revealed to him piece by piece makes for compelling reading. He just keeps getting better.”
—The Seattle Times