Do White Whales Sing at the Edge of the World? by Paul Wilson

I admit it: I mooched this book purely for the title. It's a totally awesome title.

But, you know? This is maybe my best mooch to date. That includes a couple of books I've been looking for for a couple of years now, and a few wishlist books I still don't believe I won the race for. Those were great to get; but this... this is the perfect present you didn't know you wanted. I love this book. The writing sucked me in on the very first page; it's beautiful, lyrical and just sings.

So, the story is this: Gabriel Emerson is a resident in a colony for the feeble-minded somewhere on the Cumberland fells. The colony is in its final days; the residents are slowly being shuffled out and reintegrated into the outside world, and only the hardcore cases are left. As the last weeks of the colony draw to a close, Gabriel embarks on an epic journey: in a disused icehouse on the edges of the colony he sets out to re-imagine and re-trace the steps of the doomed - and disputed - discovery of a Northwest Passage by his namesake two centuries earlier.

Intertwined with Gabriel's dream - a dream powerful enough to carry three of his fellow residents through the Arctic ice with him, and be clearly visible to a fourth, watching from above and narrating the story for the rest of us - is Gabriel's story; and that of his family (unorthdox as it was); and the story of the mining town of Laing, that bore and shaped him; and that of four internees bound to the town by the detention acts for foreign nationals during WWII; and of the ways these all rubbed against each other and exloded one night in a tragedy horrifying enough to haunt Gabriel straight into the colony in the first place.

Ultimately, this is a book about dreams. It was a dream that built Laing; it was dreams that kept the internees going; it was the lack of dreams that cursed the town; it was a dream that Gabriel and his fellows followed in the last days of the colony. In Paul Wilson's own words: "But we were men who, like most poor men, fought and fought, and scrapped for life -- for pieces of the stuff in crevices and dreams. Our story is not in the leftover bones of our lives to be found bleached here in a heap on some shelf of ice, but our hearts that brought us here, and the dreams that drew us on."

I really can't recommend this book highly enough. If I ever find any more copies (priced reasonably!), I'll be buying them up to mooch out, because this definitely deserves to be out there - but this one I'm keeping for me :-).