Steller's Orchid: A Novel

by Thomas McGuire

Overview

“Subtly reveals how we arrived at the Alaska of today . . . a book that is as much about the nature of life and love as orchid hunting and ambition.” —Doug Fine, author of American Hemp Farmer

In 1924, Yale student John Lars Nelson takes ship on the SS Victoria, bound for Nome. He has been hired to do a plant survey, but his real mission is to find an orchid described by Georg Wilhelm Steller, the naturalist on Vitus Bering’s 1741 expedition. On the ship, John Lars encounters a young Aleut woman, Natasha Christiansen. Once in Nome he hires a pair of down-at-the-heels bootleggers to take him to the Shumagin Islands on their schooner, the Emilia Galotti. He quickly discovers that the two are not what they first seemed . . .

In Bristol Bay he again encounters Natasha and she joins them but she and John are marooned shortly thereafter. They cross the Alaskan Peninsula on foot and then in a borrowed skiff reach Nagai Island, where Bering made his landfall two centuries before. They find the Emilia there, along with another ship, and the hunt for the orchid brings to a violent resolution an intrigue started many years before.

“In Nelson, Tom McGuire has created a smart, capable, and endearing narrator for this old-fashioned adventure, mystery, and coming of age novel. Steller’s Orchid is authentically Alaskan and refreshingly original. It belongs on the shelf with Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World and Lynn Schooler’s Walking Home.” —Heather Lende, New York Times-bestselling author of Of Bears and Ballots

“A perfect example of literature that can entertain while also teaching about place, history and the human heart.” —Anchorage Daily News

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098281
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	06/10/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	706,643
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Tom McGuire came to Alaska with two college friends. Fifty years later he still hasn’t found reason to leave. He has worked as a salmon fisherman, carpenter, and North Slope oilfield worker. He and his wife have raised four children in a house they built on the banks of the Chilkoot River. Grizzly bears are frequent visitors. Tom has also paddled thousands of miles down (and up) northern rivers. He has published a book 99 Days on the Yukon, that describes a summerlong trip with legendary canoeist Charlie Wolf.

Read an Excerpt

I buttoned my coat and walked toward the foredeck, gulping the fresh air. The sun was setting and the light splintered off the waves in unruly facets. The wind was a full gale from the north and the ship was taking the heavy seas on the starboard bow. The cargo mast described a giddy arc against the sky. As the boat rolled the dying rays of the sun caught the big anchor winch, highlighting the rust-marred paint and silvering the spray that whipped across it.

            The top of a wave broke over the starboard rail and sluiced across the foredeck and I turned back. In the stern someone stood by the rail, the only other person outside. In the fading light I thought it was a woman in a gray dress.

As I approached my cabin my stomach began to move again like a pump gaining suction. A series of hammer-like convulsions shook me and I leaned far over the rail and retched and retched again but there was nothing in my stomach other than a little liquid that I watched spindle down to the waves.

The boat took a sudden steep roll to port and I clutched desperately at the rail as I began to tilt overboard.  A strong hand grabbed my collar and yanked me back. I sat down heavily on the wet deck and looked up to thank my benefactor. I expected a burly prospector but it was the woman in the gray dress. To my further surprise she was a girl about my own age.

            “You shouldn’t be out here,” she said with a look of concern as she hauled me to my feet. “Where’s your cabin?”

            She had an Indian’s high cheekbones and I could see thick, dark hair coiled beneath her bonnet but her eyes were gray-blue, a mirror of the evening light.

Editorial Reviews

I learned more about life in the Aleutians 100 years ago from Tom McGuire's page turner Steller’s Orchid than I did from a decade living in Alaska. In the course of drawing us in to the quest of John Lars, a young orchid seeker, McGuire subtly reveals how we arrived at the Alaska of today.. This adventurous, unforgettably original and so human saga has more than a few moments of erudite ad poetic narrative. Steller’s Orchid teaches us how and why commoditized plants have been transported around the world to comprise the modern agricultural landscape. McGuire’s narrative culminates in an exciting climax set in one of the most remote spots on the planet, a fitting end to a book that is as much about the nature of life and love as orchid hunting and ambition.
—Doug Fine, author Farewell, My Subaru and Too High to Fail

Steller's Orchid most definitely deserves a spot among the best of contemporary Alaska fiction. It’s a perfect example of literature that can entertain while also teaching about place, history and the human heart.

—Nancy Lord of Anchorage Daily News

Featured in Anchorage Daily News favorite books of 2020.

From the Publisher