What to read after “The North Water” by Ian McGuire: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Michael Palin follows HMS Erebus from its Antarctic voyages to the Arctic search for the Northwest Passage, where it set out with HMS Terror in 1845 and vanished. Drawing on letters, logs and the later discovery of the wrecks, the book tells the story of the ship and the men who sailed her.
In 1879 the USS Jeannette sails for the Arctic, chasing a theory about a warm open sea at the pole. Trapped and then crushed by the ice, the crew abandon ship and begin a desperate march across the pack toward Siberia.
In 1914 Ernest Shackleton sets out to cross Antarctica; in 1915 his ship is crushed by the ice and the crew is left stranded. This account follows their months on drifting floes and the desperate open-boat journey he makes to seek rescue.
In 1845 two Royal Navy ships sail to find the Northwest Passage and vanish into the Arctic ice. As the crews endure cold, scurvy and starvation, they are stalked across the frozen waste by a creature that should not exist.
In 1800, Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey takes command of a small brig and meets the ship's surgeon, Stephen Maturin, a naturalist and secret intelligence agent. Their friendship grows as the crew pursues a Spanish frigate across the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
The Viking Red Orm sails from his Scandinavian home in the late tenth century and is carried through raids, courts and distant seas, from Andalusia to the Byzantine guard. A picaresque saga of raids, treasure and shifting faith, told with dry humour and a wide view of the Viking world.
Virginia Reeve is hired to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of a lost expedition. When only some of them come back, she is tried for murder in Boston. The courtroom testimony and the journey north slowly reveal what happened out on the ice.
Smilla, a Greenlander living in Copenhagen, trusts the snow. When a neighbour's young son falls from a roof, the tracks tell her it was no accident, and her search leads from the city to an icebreaker bound for a remote Greenland island.
Four young refugees cross a frozen East Prussia in the winter of 1945, each hiding a secret and hoping to reach a ship that will carry them west. Their paths merge among the crowds fleeing the advancing Soviet army, bound for a vessel whose fate none of them suspect.
In 1740 a British warship hunting a Spanish treasure galleon is wrecked off Patagonia. Months later two groups of survivors reach South America with opposing stories, and a court martial must decide which men were heroes and which were mutineers.
In the 1850s, a teenage runaway known only as the kid drifts into a borderland of scalphunters and broken towns. He joins the Glanton gang, whose campaign against Apache raiders becomes indiscriminate slaughter, shadowed by a pale, learned judge who preaches war as the highest law.
In 1348, as the Black Death empties France, a disgraced knight finds an orphan girl in a dead village. She says the plague is only part of a larger war between heaven and hell, and persuades him to carry her across a ruined land toward Avignon.
Kinch Na Shannack owes his guild of thieves more than he can ever pay. To settle the debt he tags along with a scarred knight on a journey to find women taken by goblins, through a world of old wars, hungry gods and creatures that would happily eat a thief.
Mercedes Murcatto, a mercenary general, survives an ambush by the duke she served and loses her brother in the same fall. Assembling a crew of killers and madmen, she begins a patient campaign of revenge in which no method is too cruel and no ally is safe.
In 1921, an Iñupiat seamstress joins a Canadian expedition to Wrangel Island as a cook. When the men leave or die, she is left alone on the island for months, learning to hunt and survive while waiting for a rescue that may never come.
A British weather station on an Arctic ice floe sends a distress call after a fire. A US nuclear submarine is sent to rescue the survivors, but the narrator, a doctor with unclear orders, finds that the station was also a listening post and that someone aboard is lying.
Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince in Jerusalem, is betrayed by his childhood friend Messala and condemned to the galleys. Years later he returns to seek revenge against Rome, while his path repeatedly crosses that of a teacher whose message challenges his plans.
Army priest and crime boss Tomas Piety returns from war to find his businesses stolen and his people starving. With his old gang, the Pious Men, he sets out to take back Ellinburg, and is pulled into a web of politics and foreign agents that turns his home into a new battlefield.
Sold into slavery after her father's death, Amara works in a brothel in Pompeii, owned by a man she hates. She hides her education and waits, building ties with the other women and looking for a way out, in a city where even a slave can sometimes buy back her freedom.
Nine-year-old Jorg watched raiders murder his mother and brother. By thirteen he leads a band of killers, and by fifteen he means to take his father's throne. Ruthless and brilliant, he treats cruelty as a tool and will pay any price for the crown he believes is his.
Two centuries after The Pillars of the Earth, four children in Kingsbridge witness a killing that binds their fates together. As plague sweeps the land, they struggle with love, ambition and the harsh rules of their age.
A wandering sailor joins the whaling ship Pequod, whose captain is obsessed with hunting the white whale that took his leg. As the voyage stretches across the oceans, the crew is dragged toward a reckoning. A vast, digressive novel of obsession, the sea and human nature.
In 1937, a young London clerk joins a year-long expedition to a remote bay in Svalbard. As the polar night closes in and his companions leave one by one, he stays alone with the radio, the cold, and a presence that seems to be waiting in the abandoned camp.
Logen Ninefingers only wants to be left alone, but his past will not release him. Elsewhere a spoiled nobleman, a crippled inquisitor who tortures for the state, and an old magician are drawn into a conspiracy that could decide the fate of the Union itself.
Start with “Erebus: The Story of a Ship”, “In the Kingdom of Ice”, “Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage”: they are the closest to “The North Water” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The North Water” these are Arctic, Nautical Adventure, Survival), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Erebus: The Story of a Ship”, “In the Kingdom of Ice”, “The Terror”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
