Naslund's fifth novel had a modest first printing of 150,000 copies: enough not to be considered rare. There was a 20 city book tour, where no doubt this was signed. Tight, clean, crisp, square and flat book in lightly wrinkled DJ. 2 bumped tips. Signed by the author on the FFEP (frontis verso). The signature is on large pre-printed pasted down label which was issued by the publisher.

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,"" says Una Spenser, the eponymous narrator, in the first sentence of this deliciously old-fashioned bildungsroman, adventure story and romance. Naslund's inspiration, based on one reference in Moby-Dick, ... should please most other readers with its suspenseful, affecting, historically accurate and seductive narrative.

At age 12, Una escapes her religiously obsessed father in rural Kentucky to live with relatives in a lighthouse off New Bedford, Mass. When she is 16--disguised as a boy--she runs off to sea aboard a whaler, which sinks after being rammed by its quarry. Una and two young men who love her are the only survivors of a group set adrift in an open boat, but the dark secret of their cannibalism will leave its mark.

Rescued, Una is wed to one of the young men by the captain of the Pequod, handsome, commanding Ahab, who has not as yet met the white whale that will be his destiny. These events--recounted in stately prose nicely dotted with literary allusions--take the reader only through the first quarter of the book. Una's later marriage to Ahab--a passionate and intellectually satisfying relationship--the loss of her mother and her newborn son in one night, and her life as a rich woman in Nantucket are further developments in a plot teeming with arresting events and provocative ideas.

Una is an enchanting protagonist: intellectually curious, sensitive, imaginative and kind. But Naslund also endows her with restlessness, rash impetuosity and a refreshing skepticism about traditional religion, qualities that humanize what verges on an idealized personality, and that motivate Una's search for spiritual sustenance. Unitarianism and Universalism are two of the religions she investigates; other ""dark issues of our time"" include slavery, and the position of women.

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