"A major new novel by the award-winning author of Good to a Fault and The Little Shadows, about two sisters who live aboard one of the last merchant ships to sail the South Pacific. "Up from underneath comes a blue-black swell, a whale rising in a long arc. Kay waits, hovering in the difference between herself and the creature." What is the difference between ourselves and other humans? Between those we consider human and those we consider animal? Where exactly does that difference live in our minds? These are the questions that Marina Endicott, one of our most beloved storytellers, explores in this sweeping, intoxicating novel set aboard one of the last merchant sailing ships to make its way through the South Pacific in the early 1900s. Thea and Kay are half-sisters, separated in age by more than a decade. After the death of their ailing father, a stern minister at a residential school in Canada, Thea is free to marry her love, the captain of a ship. But she cannot abandon her younger sister, so Kay comes aboard too, and together they embark on a life-changing voyage through the South Pacific and around the Cape of Good Hope. At the heart of The Difference is one crystallizing moment: Thea, after a devastating miscarriage, "purchases" a young boy from an island in Micronesia for four tins of tobacco, adopting him as her own. The repercussions of this rash act reverberate through the novel. In gorgeous prose full of fascinating detail about shipboard life, Endicott shows us a rapidly vanishing world in all its wildness and wonder, and its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty too. She also brilliantly illuminates our own times through Kay's constant examination of the idea of "difference"--between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs, species. A breathtaking tour-de-force by one of our most celebrated authors, a writer with the astonishing ability to bring a past world to vivid life while subtly revealing the moral complexity of our own."-- Provided by publisher.