American Book Review Calls THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT a "Prize-Winning Masterpiece"

The current issue of American Book Review features a glowing review of Bernard du Boucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent. Translated from the French by Hester Velmans, this powerful novel retells the adventures of a sea voyage in the fourteenth century that leads an evangelical group to a lost colony among floating ice and snow.

Critic Dinda Gorlee notes "Bernard du Boucheron should be lauded for his efforts to create this history-based chronicle, The Voyage of the Short Serpent, a prize-winning masterpiece. Hester Velmans, the literary translator, has moved her translation forward to the creative illumination of a kind of co-authorship, jointly with the author. Reading the English translation of the tale of the frozen wasteland of New Thule, with the French original book, Court Serpent, alongside, Velman's suggestive, often insightful, translation fills the readers (and this critic) with nothing less than a great awe of Velman's magical professionalism."

THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT in LA Weekly

Nathan Ihara notes the "bleak wisdom" of Bernard du Bucheron's harrowing novel The Voyage of the Short Serpent in the current issue of LA Weekly. Told in an elegant, compulsive, and increasingly unhinged style, Bernard du Boucheron’s award-winning novel is a masterpiece about mutable human morality in inhuman conditions—a story about truth, obsession, and the myth of utopia.

THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT in The New York Times Book Review

Bernard du Boucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is reviewed in Sunday's New York Times Book Review: "Tackling the gruesome and the grotesque with gleeful abandon, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is an eccentric, slightly maddened and often brutally funny tale of a colony of Roman Catholics marooned in medieval Greenland by the encroachment of a new ice age. Much has been made in France of the fact that its author, Bernard du Boucheron, was 76 years old when “Voyage,” his first novel, was published, and there’s something oddly triumphal about the way the narrative takes direct aim at death — which, despite its omnipresence (the bodies pile up rapidly) is never entirely conceded to."

THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT in the Houston Chronicle

Bernard du Boucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is reviewed in the Houston Chronicle book section. Critic Robert Zaretsky says "the novel reads as if Cormac McCarthy had channeled Jack London, or better yet, Dostoyevsky . . . a compelling and well-crafted tale."

THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT Featured in LA Times

In the Los Angeles Times "Discoveries" column, Susan Salter Reynolds takes note of The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron, translated from the French by Hester Velmans: "The the cardinal-archbishop sends a fledgling Bishop on a mission to New Thule to save the colonists from heathendom: "You will ferret out and punish heresy, apostasy, infidelity, neglect of religious practice, perjury, gluttony, lusts both simple and sodomitic." But nothing prepares the bishop or his crew for the voyage through ice, the hunger that forces them to eat the corpses of their shipmates, the devastation and desperation they find. "To describe the poverty of these wretches is to wish to share it," the bishop reports back. And nothing prepares him for his own heresy. The settlers have mixed with the Inuit, and the bishop is hordfled by the local sexual practices — fornication in public, sharing of wives, trading of women for supplies. It is not long before he fathers a child (although he denies it) and is punished by the settlers for his hypocrisy. The Voyage ofthe Short Serpent is more than a story of survival in the frozen north; it's a parable on the perils of excessive morality, colonization and religious tyranny."

THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT in Booklist

Bernard du Boucheron's award-winning novel, The Voyage of the Short Serpent, gets a rave review in Booklist: "A medieval bishop travels to the most desolate, forgotten regions of Iceland to investigate reports of paganism among the wretched settlers, whose major choice in life is to die of starvation, freezing, or, once the bishop arrives, torture (for the salvation of their souls, naturally). The story comprises mostly a report from the bishop, whose matter-of-fact tone is so ridiculously incongruous to the atrocities that he encounters (“the crew had partaken of human flesh, even on fish days”) and that he perpetrates (burning a fallen priest at the stake slowly in seal-oil, wood being too scarce for the task) that it is laugh-out-loud funny and revolting at once. With touches of Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies, du Boucheron’s stark tale raises questions of how far we have really traveled from such barbarism, or how quick the fall back might be. Despite all the awful and gruesome happenings, though, the writing is splendid, and this is a strangely pleasurable and completely riveting read, if you’ve got the stomach for it. Fans of post-apocalyptic waste-land tales might be surprised to find them in the past as well." The Voyage of the Short Serpent will be available in bookstores next month!