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Call Me Ishmaelle
Brief Description
From prize-winning author Xiaolu Guo comes a dazzling gender-flipped reimagining of Moby Dick. Moby-Dick reimagined from the perspective of a cross-dressed female sailor. Brilliantly written... ambitious, brave, strange - Philip Hoare One of the most valuable writers in the world - Deborah Levy 1843. Ishmaelle is...
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Call Me Ishmaelle
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Description
From prize-winning author Xiaolu Guo comes a dazzling gender-flipped reimagining of Moby Dick.
Moby-Dick reimagined from the perspective of a cross-dressed female sailor.
Brilliantly written... ambitious, brave, strange - Philip Hoare
One of the most valuable writers in the world - Deborah Levy
1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York.
Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville's Moby Dick from a female perspective. As the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors in Polynesian harpooner, Kauri, and Taoist monk, Muzi, whose readings of the I-Ching guide their quest.
Through the bloody male violence of whaling, and the unveiling of her feminine identity, Ishmaelle realises there is a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale, Moby Dick. Xiaolu Guo has crafted a dramatically different, feminist narrative that stands alongside the original while offering a powerful exploration of nature, gender, and human purpose.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781529929997
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 19 March 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Vintage
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 30.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 302g
Pages: 448
About the Author
Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include- Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.
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Call Me Ishmaelle
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