The Plover
Declan O'Donnell, a flinty Oregon fisherman who has had quite enough of other people, sets out from Astoria in his small boat the Plover with no plan beyond pointing himself across the Pacific Ocean and seeing what happens. He intends to be alone. Instead, by the time the Plover has crossed the equator, he has acquired a stoic seabird that refuses to leave the rigging, an injured stowaway with a small daughter who barely speaks, an extraordinary gull, a cancer-stricken philosopher, and a Latvian sailor with an interest in Edmund Burke's essay on the sublime. Brian Doyle's 2014 novel is part picaresque, part essay collection, part hymn to Pacific weather and salmon and the obscure courage of the sea. Doyle, the longtime editor of the University of Portland's Portland Magazine, writes in long looping rhythmic sentences that turn an unlikely small-boat voyage into one of the most expansive novels of friendship in recent American fiction.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Plover
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Oregon fisherman Declan O Donnell sails his boat the Plover out of Newport one morning and points it west, planning to live alone on the Pacific. He picks up an injured gull, a man with a young daughter, and a piratical crew across thousands of miles of open water.
The Plover was written by Brian Doyle and published in 2014. Doyle was an Oregon-based essayist and novelist; he died in 2017. The Plover is widely cited as one of his masterworks.
The Plover uses Brian Doyle's signature long-sentence prose style, with extensive interior monologue and digressions. The form takes adjustment but rewards patient readers. The premise is a man sailing alone across the Pacific.
The Plover is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Plover is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.