“Murray Lee brings a fresh and funny voice to literary fiction. His incisive wit and keen eye for detail bring alive characters who have a proclivity for over-reaching and stranding themselves in unexpected and adventurous situations.” - Jane Ryder
"In Murray Lee’s engrossing novel Compass, a travel writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of previous polar expeditions sets out on his own trip to the Arctic. Both a gripping tale about an explorer’s bravado and a witty satirization of the expedition stories that fascinate armchair adventurers, Compass is a novel that follows an outsider to the edge of the world—and to the edge of his sanity.”
“A darkly comedic tale, superbly told, Compass is a tour-de-force debut from an author whose name we should all remember. This is storytelling at its finest, featuring shape-shifting Arctic landscapes, a wryly laconic Inuit guide, an undersea sorceress and a disturbing finale. I read it wrapped in warm blankets, both grateful and envious at not having to face the same travails as the novel's hapless narrator."
Will Ferguson, winner of the Giller Prize, the Leacock Medal and the Libris Award Fiction Book of the Year; author of The Finder, 419, Happiness, The Shoe on the Roof and How to Be a Canadian
“Stunningly good writing, an effortless flow of language, word choices of startling precision and beauty…a highly literate, intelligent novel and a riveting story.”
Sharon Butala, finalist for the Governor General’s Award, winner of the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize; author of Season of Fury and Wonder, Zara’s Dead and Where I Live Now
“Start with long experience of the Arctic and its people. Add a deep knowledge of exploration history and a gift for telling tall tales. Sprinkle with dark humor and bare-faced fabrications – why did Franklin go back to sea again? – and you get a phantasmagoric adventure, wildly original, from the land of the midnight sun.”
Ken McGoogan, award-winning author of Arctic books including Fatal Passage, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Dead Reckoning
“A powerful and visceral exploration of one man’s journey to the physical and psychological edge. Compass fuses the solitary struggle of The Martian, the magical realism of Life of Pi, and the twisted psychology of Heart of Darkness, layered on a stark northern landscape.
Arun Lakra, author of Sequence and winner of the Woodward Newman Drama Prize and the Praxis Screenplay Competition
“Murray Lee’s Compass flips the old school hagiographies of European explorers lost in the High Arctic, and in their place offers up a hallucinatory, perilous voyage to The Edge, narrated by a less-than-stable outsider with a suitcase full of stories of long-dead adventurers and a penchant for comic asides.”
Brian Preston, author of Pot Planet, Me Chi and Bruce Lee, and All the Romance a Man Can Stomach
“Murray Lee’s debut novel Compass is a meditation on hubris that takes the reader to the blinding white light of the Arctic and the limits of a southern adventurer's endurance.”
Monica Kidd, author of Chance Encounters with Wild Animals
“A bleakly comic cautionary tale. The narrative is witty, honest, sardonic. This is a man-against-nature novel in a grand tradition."
Doug Logan, author of Boatsense
About Compass
We can’t all be heroes. Some try and succeed. Others posture and pretend. And a few—just a few—set off on their hero’s quest only to discover that failure was within them all along.
Compass recounts the adventures of a man who, after traveling the world shilling stories for a major geographic magazine about historic expeditions and explorers, sets out on an adventure of his own—an ill-advised and poorly planned trip to the Arctic floe edge under the disorienting twenty-four-hour summer sun. When the ice breaks and his guide disappears, the narrator ends up alone and adrift in the hostile northern sea. He draws on his knowledge of historic expeditions to craft his own, inept, attempt at survival. As time passes and he becomes increasingly disoriented, his obsession with Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea, becomes terrifyingly real.
Part Life of Pi, part Into the Wild, Compass draws heavily on true historical adventures, Inuit mythology, and its Arctic setting. The narrator, a self-aware buffoon who remains nameless throughout, is both remarkably well-informed and entirely useless. He knows just enough to steer himself into the path of disaster—repeatedly, often comically, and ultimately tragically.
Murray Lee - Bio
I am a writer, doctor and teacher of medicine. Throughout my career, I have split my time between North and South — practicing as a fly-in physician for isolated communities in the Canadian Arctic and working with actors, clinicians and students while running the Communication Skills program at the University of Calgary medical school. For over fifteen years I have served as the regular visiting doctor to Naujaat, Nunavut, a traditional Inuit community on the Arctic Circle, whose people, culture and geography greatly inform the setting and character of Compass. For me, medicine at its core is an exploration of story and a study of character. I have spent most of my life sucking up stories. Writing is the creative expression that lets them all back out.
FAQs
Q: Are you really a doctor?
A: Yes, I am.
Q: In that case, are you really an author?
A: Ummm....
Q: Don't you have any family members to thank?
A: I absolutely do. I owe everything to my incredibly intelligent, talented and gorgeous wife Marla, without whom I would be nothing and these books would not exist. Honestly, there is nobody else who could possibly have inspired me, supported me, encouraged me, enlightened me and helped me as much as she has. She is, as Humbert Humbert so memorably put it, the light of my life and the fire of my loins. And I have written this paragraph all by myself and entirely of my own volition.
Q: Where do you get your rugged good looks?
A: Handed out free to all Canadians along with universal medical coverage (viz. Donald Sutherland, Simu Liu, Ryan Reynolds, etc.).
Q: Does your medical background inform your books?
A: It certainly does. Compass incorporates elements of Inuit culture and mythology, along with Northern climate and geography, all of which have been important parts of my practice in Nunavut for the last two decades. Quack (the novel I am working on now) has themes of medical and metaphysical quackery and a 19th century pharmaceutical mystery that lies at the heart of the story.
Q: What gives you the right to write about Nunavut?
A: Compass is set in Nunavut, in a community similar to the one that I have had the privilege to serve over the last 15 years. I love the place and the people and am humbled to be a small part of the community, and I hope that is reflected in the book. But the main character — Guy — is in every way an outsider and someone who himself has no right to be there. The historical adventurers whose stories Guy himself tells are, as he says, “braggarts and boors — good riddance to them all.” So I guess you could say I’m fairly confident writing in the voice of a middle-aged white man with imposter syndrome.
Q: Where can I find you?
A: If not in Calgary and the nearby Canadian Rockies or somewhere in Nunavut, I’m probably sitting on a small plane traveling between the two. Maybe send me an email. Or look for me on Instagram at 12angryseals.
Buy the book
Compass was published by Publerati (a really amazing small, independent publisher) on September 27, 2022.
You can order the book online, but how about supporting an independent bookstore? Here are some of the shops that will carry Compass in their brick-and-mortar shops. Or you can ask your local bookstore to order it for you.
Kindle/Kobo/ePub versions are also available through the usual sources: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Chapters Indigo, etc.
CANADA
Pages – Calgary, AB
Shelf Life Books – Calgary, AB
The Next Page – Calgary, AB
Café Books – Canmore, AB
Pixie Hollow – High River, AB
Volume One – Duncan, BC
Bookingham Palace – Salmon Arm, BC
Upstart & Crow – Vancouver, BC
McNally Robinson – Winnipeg (Grand Forks), MB
King’s Co-op Bookstore – Halifax, NS
Bookmark – Halifax, NS
Lunenburg Bound – Lunenburg, NS
Queen Books – Toronto, ON
Mill Street Books – Almonte, ON
Novel Idea – Kingston, ON
Books on Beechwood – Ottawa, ON
Argo Bookshop – Montreal, QC
Turning the Tide Bookstore – Saskatoon, SK
Mac's Fireweed Books – Whitehorse, YT
Chapters/Indigo – Calgary-area stores
USA
The Writer’s Block - Anchorage, AK
Orinda Books – Orinda, CA
Adventure Ink – Pine Mountain Club, CA
Barbed Wire Books – Longmont, CO
The Bookloft – Great Barrington, MA
Mockingbird Bookshop – Bath, ME
Devaney, Doak & Garrett – Farmington, ME
Fine Print – Kennebunkport, ME
Country Bookshelf – Bozeman, MT
Chapter One – Hamilton, MT
Malaprop’s Bookstore / Cafe – Asheville, NC
Fireside Book Shop – Chagrin Falls, OH
Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe – Bend, OR
Novel – Memphis, TN
Lark & Owl Booksellers – Georgetown, TX
The Flying Pig Bookstore – Shelburne, VT
Bridgeside Books – Waterbury, VT
Third Place Books – Lake Forest Park, WA
Wind City Books – Casper, WY
Follow Murray Lee on Instagram at 12angryseals or send me a message using the form below.
Sea lion photo by Elianne Dipp via Pexels
Compass cover artwork: Ningiukulu Teevee, Glittering Walrus, 2019. Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts
All other images copyright Murray Lee, 2021