EW PICK
Georgina Harding's The Solitude of Thomas Cave alternates between the words of Thomas Cave, a 17th-century widower waiting out a brutal Arctic island winter with only the howling wind and a stray bear for company, and those of a worried crewmate from the whaling ship that left Cave alone on the shore. Harding wastes no words in this graceful, visceral meditation on loneliness and grief, on the power of Mother Nature and the human mind. At one point, Cave's shipmate stands in awe of the man, ''not for any heroics but for the bare dignity in him.'' The same can be said for this extraordinarily precise and powerful novel. A
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