As the chill settles over Washington, we’re turning up the hygge with two Scandinavian novels set at sea, from the fjords of Norway to imperial-era Helsinki.
As the chill settles over Washington, we’re turning up the hygge with two Scandinavian novels set at sea, from the fjords of Norway to imperial-era Helsinki.
Beasts of the Sea: A Novel
Iida Turpeinen, trans. David Hackston (Little, Brown and Company, 288 pp., $28, November 2025)
Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel, Beasts of the Sea, has already secured its spot in the canon of great climate literature. First published in Finland in 2023, the book topped bestseller lists in the country and earned translation rights in 28 languages. The U.S. edition is set to hit shelves next week.
Beasts of the Sea is a work of historical fiction; a grim story of man-made destruction that spans four centuries. The novel begins and ends with brief modern-day vignettes at Helsinki’s Natural History Museum, where visitors marvel at a skeleton of an extinct species known as Steller’s sea cow. Then, Turpeinen whisks the reader back to 1741, when Finland was part of the Russian Empire, for the first of three lengthy historical chapters.
That year, Catherine the Great dispatches an expedition led by Capt
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