ABOUT
THE BOOK

This exhilarating novel of great depth and power is the story of one man’s quest for the secret of his origins that ranges from nineteenth-century St. John’s to the bustling streets of New York to the remotest regions of the Arctic.
When Devlin is young child, he and his mother, Amelia, are suddenly abandoned by his father, Dr. Francis Stead, who flees St. John’s to practice medicine among the Eskimos. Soon after, Amelia disappears into the icy ocean off Signal Hill. Rather than return home, his father joins the American Lieutenant Peary on one of his attempts to reach the North Pole, but wanders off from camp one night and is never seen again. Now orphaned, Devlin grows up an outcast and a loner.
And then one day he receives an extraordinary letter – a letter that will challenge everything Devlin ever thought he knew about himself. He will sail from St. John’s to New York to become the protégé of Dr. Frederick Cooke, Peary’s great rival in the race for the pole. While in Manhattan, he falls in love with a young woman who has an astonishing family connection to Amelia.
In The Navigator of New York, Wayne Johnston’s descriptions of place – whether of the frozen Arctic wastes or the city of New York, bursting with New York, bursting with the energy of a metropolis about to become the capital city of the globe – evoke an extraordinary physicality and conviction.