“No character was ever thrown into such strange relief as Gilliatt… here, indeed, the true position of man in the universe.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson
The Toilers of the Sea tells the tale of Gilliatt, an outcast fisherman who must rescue one of the engines from a wrecked steamship. If successful, he will win the hand of the shipowner’s beautiful daughter, Deruchette. He will brave the harsh rocks, the freezing waves, and even the grasp of a sea monster to prove his worth.
Both a fairytale and richly detailed study of early nineteenth-century Guernsey, The Toilers of the Sea is the oft-forgotten novel that completes Hugo’s famed trilogy with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. It is a tribute to the drama of nature and the insignificance of man against it, to solitude in exile, and the light we choose to carry in the darkness.
About the author
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics.
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