Fathoms: The World in the Whale

Giggs was standing on a beach in Australia watching a humpback whale die — a process that takes days, during which the animal's insides boil beneath its blubber, during which the crowd takes selfies — and she started asking a question that became this book: what does the whale's life tell us about the condition of our seas? The answer turns out to be everything. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Giggs, a Perth writer whose essays have appeared in Granta and The Atlantic, uses the whale as a lens through which plastic pollution, industrial whaling, species extinction, the chemistry of the deep ocean, and the limits of human empathy all become simultaneously legible. The prose is a poet's — dense, surprising, demanding rereading not for clarity but for the sheer pleasure of what she does with a sentence. The political argument is embedded in the beauty: that we live as if independent of nature, and when we poison it we poison ourselves, and the whale's contaminated blubber is the evidence. The companion to Cod on the shelf — Kurlansky documents five centuries of extraction, Giggs renders what it actually looks like to stand at the end of that history and understand what you are part of. Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.