Moby Dick

The novel Moby Dick, or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville is a classic tale of the voyage of the whaling ship, Pequod and its captain, Ahab, who relentlessly pursues a sperm whale called Moby Dick around the world. Narrated from the perspective of Ishmael, the book tells the story of Ahab's madness and obsessiveness with his hunting pursuit. A novel of adventure and a treatise on whaling, the book is also the author's lifelong meditation on America, brilliantly put together in a peculiar style with dark humour.
"To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes."
-London Morning Advertiser, October 24, 1851