The Difference

By Marina Endicott

From one of our most critically acclaimed and beloved storytellers comes a sweeping novel set on board the Morning Light, a Nova Scotian merchant ship sailing through the south pacific in 1912.

Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea returns to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay too embarks on a life-changing voyage to the other side of the world.

At the heart of The Difference is a crystallizing moment in Micronesia: Thea, still mourning a miscarriage, forms a bond with a young boy from a remote island and takes him on board as her own son. Over time, the repercussions of this act force Kay, who considers the boy her brother, to examine her own assumptions--which are increasingly at odds with those of society around her--about what is forgivable and what is right.

Inspired by a true story, Endicott shows us a now-vanished world in all its wonder, and in its darkness, prejudice and difficulty, too. She also brilliantly illuminates our present time through Kay's examination of the idea of "difference"--between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs and species. The Difference is a breathtaking novel by a writer with an astonishing ability to bring past worlds vividly to life while revealing the moral complexity of our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780735276697

Reviews for The Difference

[paradiseporch · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Actually 4.5What an imagination Endicott has! Everything she writes is so different from everything else she writes. This south seas journey was richly documented through the eyes of a young girl. So foreign and yet the questions of race and appropriation, even well-intentioned, are so current and familiar.HUGELY UNDERREAD outside Canada.

[romonko · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Morning Light set out from Yarmouth on the early tide and ran with a light wind south along the shore before reaching the open sea." And so begins the adventure with 12 year-old Kay and her sister Thea and Thea's new husband Francis. The time is 1911 and orphaned Kay is leaving on a sea adventure with her older sister who has raised her. Kay is like any twelve year old. She asks a lot of questions, and she has a very hard time understanding adult behaviour. But she is a little different than most twelve year olds too as she thinks more deeply and asks probing questions, and she loses her temper when she doesn't get truthful answers. Perhaps that is because she has grown up in a residential school where her father was headmaster. Kay saw inequality and prejudice where no one else saw it at that school, and the memories from that haunt her dreams at night. Now she begins her epic voyage halfway around the world, and the sights and places that she sees are astounding. Marina Endicott's prose is beautiful and descriptive so this book is a lot like a travelogue and because she is such a master with the English language it puts the reader right there with Kay. The second half of the book is the years later after the Great War, and Kay and her adopted brother are setting out on another sea adventure on their own. Kay is trying to right a wrong from ten years ago when her brother was purchased from some South Sea Island fisherman for four cans of tobacco. This is a beautifully written book that proceeds at a leisurely pace just like sailing proceeded at the turn of the 20th century. I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the best sea adventures that I've ever read.