Captain Mandible

He inherited a skull. It had opinions.

Clearing his aunt's house, a forty-one-year-old history teacher brings down a cardboard box from above the cold-water tank. Inside, wrapped in a tea towel with a Dutch windmill on it, is the head of his great-great-grandfather: Victorian master mariner, dead since 1896, lower jaw long gone.

That night, in his own kitchen, it starts talking.

What follows is an education. Across one winter, the Captain teaches him to navigate. How to aim ten miles wide of where you're going, so that when the coast comes up you know which way to turn. Why every compass lies, and why a wise man writes the lies down. Why a ship carries her weight low, and what happens to the man who carries nothing at all. Nine lessons, each dressed as seamanship, each aimed squarely at a life that has quietly run aground.

But the old man wants something in return.

There is a wreck on that coast. Nine hands lost on a clear night in 1861, a verdict that has stood for a hundred and sixty years, and a dead master still wearing a lie that was never his. The Captain has been waiting a very long time to correct the record — and when the talking is done, he wants carrying out past the harbour and putting over the side.

Meanwhile the teacher's daughter, a first-year physics student, hasn't rung since March.

Funny, salt-cured and quietly devastating, Captain Mandible is a novel about inherited silence and the courage it takes to break it: about the errors families hand down without ever naming them, and what it costs to finally write one honestly in the log.

"Nobody knows where they are. Nobody has ever known where they are. You put those together and make your mark on the chart in pencil, and you write the time beside it, and then you go below and sleep on a guess."

For readers of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, A Man Called Ove and Lincoln in the Bardo — and anyone who has ever wanted one more conversation with the dead.