Beasts of the sea

Turpeinen's masterful debut, set over the course of two centuries, charts the tragic extinction of a magnificent mammal due entirely to human actions. In the middle of the eighteenth century, naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller joins a polar expedition. When the ship goes off course, stranding the crew, Steller makes a monumental discovery and records the existence of an incredible marine creature he dubs the sea cow. It isn't long before the starving crew are hunting the sea cows for sustenance, but their clumsy methods cause them to slaughter and lose many of the creatures to the sea before they can reel them in. Over a century later, the governor of Alaska sends an expedition to recover a sea cow skeleton that Steller was forced to abandon, and the governor's sickly sister finds her life's purpose in studying the remains of this and other arctic creatures. It isn't until the mid-twentieth century that the skeleton of the sea cow is properly restored and displayed in a Finnish museum, but hopes that the species may have survived human hunters are dashed. Turpeinen's historical debut is a moving and tragic testament to a lost species and a gimlet-eyed look at the toll human existence takes on the ecosystem.

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.)