In Matt Riordan’s debut novel, a college student in need of quick money finds work on an Alaskan fishing boat in the unforgiving Bering Sea.
THE NORTH LINE
by Matt Riordan
Hyperion Avenue, April 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)
Everyone believes Adam to be something he’s not. Sometimes that’s because he’s told them a story. Sometimes he’s told himself one. But when Adam joins an Alaskan fishing crew that’s promising money he desperately needs, the dangerous work and harsh lifestyle strip away all fabrications and force a dark-hearted exploration of who he really is.
On the unforgiving Bering Sea, Adam finds the adventure and authenticity of a fisherman’s life revelatory. The labor required to seize bounty from the ocean invigorates him, and the often crude comradery accompanies a welcome, hard-earned wisdom. But when a strike threatens the entire season and violence stalks the waves, Adam is thrust into a struggle for survival at the edge of the world, where evolutionary and social forces collide for outcomes beyond anyone’s control.
In his riveting debut novel, Matt Riordan pairs personal experiences with a master storyteller’s eye in a piercing examination of the quest for identity in the face of tempests within and without.
“THE NORTH LINE is a ruggedly erudite story that combines the best of the individualism of Jack London with the introspective ruminations of Raymond Carver . . . not to be missed.” —S.A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed
« THE NORTH LINE is one of those rare books that you feel as much as read. The world and its details are so real, so intimate, and so lived-in and that I had to check my fingertips for fish scales once I finished reading. » —Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone
“Riordan is summoning demons in this grimy wilderness saga that might hit entirely too close to home for those who know. Magnificent. » —Laird Barron, author of The Wind Began to Howl
Matt Riordan grew up in Michigan but spent his early twenties working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. After college, Matt drifted from commercial fishing through a variety of jobs before landing in law school. He then became a litigator in New York City, where he practiced for twenty years. He now lives with his family in Australia.
Book 1: THE ASSASSIN THIEF
Book 2: THE SOUL THIEF
Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life. When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.
Lee graduated from the top of her class at the Program and expected a placement at a top company. Instead she’s sent to collect data for a company nobody’s ever heard of that’s trying to teach an AI to act as “a true friend.” Lee begins voyeuristically: gathering information online and observing her outgoing roommate Veronika. But then the team learns that their company is secretly trying to cure loneliness, an emotion erased from society decades ago but somehow returned and spreading rapidly; the “true friend” AI is one of the few tech ventures that hasn’t yet failed. The company becomes desperate. Lee’s pressured into not just inputting data she finds online, but giving the AI the data of her own real-world experiences. She’s pushed into a zany mindset of chasing experiences to feed the AI.