A Canadian fishing village is obsessed with the one that got away . . . but is someone getting away with murder? For the first time in thirty years, all the signs have returned to the waters off The Shores—signs of a presumed-gone and possibly legendary giant cod. Ninety-year-old Abel Mack once almost landed it, but a photograph is the only evidence the big one ever existed. Now, at all costs, two powerful men with competing interests are after the biggest cod. They are closing in on The Shores—but the fisherman is missing. At the best of times, Abel is there one minute, gone the next. His best friends and family are not sure they would recognize him if they found him. Is he dead, by foul play or misadventure, or dead of exposure, as Mountie Jane Jamieson suspects? Or is he alive and sure to return, as his wife Gus Mack insists? Does the never-at-home Abel even exist outside Gus’s memory or imagination, Hy McAllister wonders…or has he been kidnapped for what he knows about the codfish? “A natural storyteller, superbly equipped both by her character and experience to fashion stories of the lives of everyday people who make their living from the sea.” —Ottawa Review of Books

Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been spurred by it, national diets have been based on it, economies have depended on it, and the settlement of North America was driven by it. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod -- frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. Cod is a charming tour of history with all its economic forces laid bare and a fish story embellished with great gastronomic detail. It is also a tragic tale of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once the cod's numbers were legendary. In this deceptively whimsical biography of a fish, Mark Kurlansky brings a thousand years of human civilization into captivating focus.

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Reproduction of the original: By the World Forgot by Cyrus Townsend Brady