From the author of the National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index – hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “an extraordinary magical mystery tour of a book” – comes a startlingly original exploration of the unpredictability of fate and the mystery of our own mortality.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay forgotten underwater until it was found and raised more than three hundred years later.

Beginning with Joan Wickersham’s first sight of the ship in its Stockholm museum, her pieces – intimate, irreverent, urgent – weave together Vasa’s story and the associations it evokes. She addresses the shipbuilders, the divers and restorers, the men and women who drowned in the wreck and the objects they left behind: shoes and cooking pots, game boards and bones. She interrogates the wind that capsized the ship and the shipworms that failed to eat the wreck. Constantly rising up are the lingering echoes of her father’s suicide; memories of her mother’s final illness and death; and the paradoxical presence of the ship itself – an emblem of death and rebirth, a monumental failure whose flaws made it an enduring success, a vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a contemplative, strange, passionate, funny, and haunting book that both is and isn’t about the ship – a personal yet universal reckoning with mortality, and the question of what vanishes and what endures.

Cover photograph by Adam Davies. To see more of his work, visit adamdavies.xyz.