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Call Me Ishmaelle

Xiaolu Guo
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Product details

  • ISBN 9781529929997
  • Weight: 302g
  • Dimensions: 129 x 197mm
  • Publication Date: 19 Mar 2026
  • Publisher: Vintage Publishing
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

‘A smart gender-flipped version of Moby Dick’ Daily Telegraph
‘A clever and original skewering of a classic’ i News
‘A brilliantly written reordering of Moby-Dick’ Philip Hoare

Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from a female perspective – perfect for fans Madeline Miller, Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver


In 1843, in a small village on the stormy Kent coast, Ishmaelle is born. She grows up swimming with dolphins and eventually – desperate for a life at sea – she disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York.

As the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale Moby Dick…

‘One of the most valuable writers in the world’ Deborah Levy

‘Guo has gender-flipped this intimidating text with bravura and style… Call Me Ishmaelle takes us on a courageous journey: it’s no aping of a classic, rather a vision of a young woman sailing out to discover not a whale but her own self. And in that, it happily succeeds’ Daily Telegraph

‘An astonishingly ambitious undertaking . . . you’re in the hands of a genuine storyteller’ New York Times Book Review
About Xiaolu Guo
Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.

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