The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos

by Kendra Langford Shaw

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Nature & the Environment

Synopsis

For readers of Karen Russell, Maggie Shipstead, and Eowyn Ivey, an exuberant, highly imaginative epic about a family that settles, against all odds, in the far reaches of the Arctic and the unexpected industry that keeps them afloat for generations.

In the far reaches of the Territory of the Arctic, the Spahr family lives on a fjord accessible only by kayak and float plane, in a landscape rapidly changing as glaciers melt and sea levels rise. Their home is Jubilation House, aptly named: they are a family of free spirit and full-hearted love, descendants of the homesteaders who came to this place in a reckless scheme to civilize the Glacial Front. They live off the grid in a converted fisherman's shack, selling pickled octopus and sea crops, barely scraping by. With every day, their livelihood seems ever more precarious.

Then one of their few neighbors dredges up a centuries-old piano, a vestige from the original homesteading expedition, when every family was required to haul a six-hundred-pound instrument as a sign of mannerly society—almost none made it to their final destination. Now, this intricately carved beauty has emerged, perfectly preserved from the frigid Arctic waters, and the antique treasure becomes a priceless collectors’ item. A new economic boom seizes the territory—piano hunting—and the Spahrs throw themselves into the quest with full-throated aplomb. But the costs of their possible salvation soon begin to mount.

The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos travels through generations, backward to the Spahrs’ homesteader origins and forward to their descendants, eccentrics and optimists all. In a voice as buoyant and vibrant as the characters themselves, Kendra Langford Shaw gives us an unforgettable and inventive ode to the abiding love of family and pull of home, even as the home we love becomes ever more challenging to inhabit.

Release date: May 12, 2026

Publisher: Pantheon

Print pages: 304

Sample

Milda

Disillusionment Bay

Late October

My little brother, Finley, drowned the first time wrestling the Napoleon pianoforte under the galactic starlight of an Arctic sunset; the way he later told the story, the piano had it coming. Our family had spent the day knee-deep in Disillusionment Bay, gigging beach frogs and slugging fireweed tea. Our parents were up the sand, loose and recumbent, snacking on octopus jerky and reading aloud journal entries my great-great-great-great-grandfather kept as his family traversed the territory to homestead a new life. Beside them on the blanket my little sister, Temperance, sang as she patted black sand into fritters and called to me: “Here’s your pancake, Milda!” It had been a long, dreamy day, I remember: honey in the air and the sharp crick of apples crisping on the trees. Down the beach Madam LeFleur stood on the porch of her boardinghouse beating slugs off a yak wool rug. Floatplanes droned overhead. Deep in the Singing Spruce Forest bear hunters unsnapped their rifles and began the long lope home.

I was sticky with salt and Finley was out too far. He was a strong swimmer for a nine-year-old, but no more than seventy pounds at full stomach. That was nothing against the rip curl. At first I didn’t pay too much attention to him—Finley was always diving after oddities. Always before, he’d resurface within a breath or two, brandishing a tuning fork or an urchin shell. A brand-new trophy to add to his collection in our attic eaves. Earlier that summer he’d spent weeks gathering bones from a dead sea lion, then wired the skeleton together and mounted it in the attic rafters so that it hung over our hammocks. Not long after, we’d rocked to sleep one night while Finley guessed what the lion might’ve eaten for a last meal and if he’d mated for life. Bones don’t tell you that kind of stuff, I said. Ever since then we’d swung to sleep in silence.

Finley’s knobby elbows finned the surface as he swam out past the break. The moment before he lost the surface he turned back and called, “Do you see it, Milda?”

I looked beyond him: nothing but breakwater, the surface a lace of algae blooms.

Then my little brother was gone.

Before I registered what was happening—what might have happened, that dark yaw of despair threatening to swallow our family whole—my mother was up and high-kicking against the tide. We, the Spahrs of Jubilation House, were a family of bravado and rosin, heart tattoos along our collarbones, moles tucked into nooks and crannies. My mother, Viola Bloomer—pinochle enthusiast and pilot—drew a great breath and dove after her son, legs butterflying up into a neat pike. A terrible minute passed. Two, then three. Temperance let loose a banshee wail. I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder.

When they resurfaced I could see right away that something was wrong. Our mother had Finley hooked by the armpits and frog-kicked the pair of them toward shore. Finley’s legs were limp, his head lolled to one side, and our mother’s forehead furrowed to the task as she gulped oxygen and beat the waves with her free arm. All at once they were on the sand, Finley splayed at awkward angles, chest pale and delicate, rib cage like a stack of wishbones. Squatting beside him, our mother beat her fists against his sternum. Tick-tock went Finley’s feet to the rhythm, tick-tock.

“Is that breathing?” my father asked.

Then all at once I found myself braced over my brother, knees and palms grinding into sand, my lips pressed to his—Finley’s dark as huckleberries, mine thin and sun-scabbed. Our buckteeth clinked painfully. A breath and two and three and four and five. Then all at once Finley was up and pushing against my chest, spluttering between us what looked like a gallon of sea bilge. Proteins and lipids and organic clots of fish scales. I suspected that a silverback whale must’ve gotten him. Chomp-chomp. I held out a hand to help lever him to his feet but Finley brushed it aside, slicked back his hair, and looked at me. Irises the color of spruce.

“I was winning,” he said.

We kayaked home. It took forty-five minutes for our family to glide from Disillusionment Bay to Jubilation House. As we drew close Finley whistled for Abraham Lincoln, the fourteen-hundred-pound sea lion we considered our family mascot. Abraham splashed up and led us through the mouth of our fjord. We’d lived in this same abode my whole life, a salmon-colored fisherman’s shack built on stilts deep in the Wild Beard Fjords. Not really stilts—our parents had recovered a quad of decorative poles originally installed along the homesteading trail up north near the territory’s capital, Arctic City. They’d driven these stilts into the fjord’s volcanic bedrock and suspended Jubilation House’s foundation between them. Raven. Grizzly. Sea Lion. Kelp. The four pillars of the Apocalypse, our mother called them.

A veranda swept around three sides of our home, the boards so knotty that high tide geysered up through the holes. We roped our kayaks along the western side. I cleat-hitched the double-hatch Finley and I shared to the dock and removed the spray skirts. “Catch me if you can,” our mother said, dancing between knotholes as we unloaded the hatches. I carried the basket with the remains of our lunch across the veranda and into the house, set it on the kitchen counter, and struck a match to light the stove underneath the pot of Black Futsu soup that Viola had prepared earlier for dinner.

Inside, our living quarters were cramped: a spartan kitchen with a butcher’s sink, knife-sharpening station, and indoor eating table. That morning it had been my job to scrape squash pulp for the soup, and leftover rinds still littered every available surface; once dried we’d store them on the veranda as treats for Abraham Lincoln’s good behavior. As I set out soup bowls, the rest of my family clattered around the living room clipping wet clothes to the fishing wire suspended as a drying rack above panoramic windows facing the fjord’s mouth. Jubilation House’s view was expansive—all day we watched floatplanes land and ski off toward Disillusionment Bay.

Temperance wandered into the kitchen and hugged my thigh while I ladled the soup. “I’m cold,” she said. At four years old my little sister couldn’t take off her own wet suit. “Hold still,” I said, and unzipped it down the back. She wriggled her arms free and I wrapped a tea towel around her shoulders to keep her warm. We all wore the same home-cut suits, patterned each year from mail-order neoprene. Temperance’s suit, like mine, had frayed at the seams from wear and tear. We looked forward to the spring, when our mother would sew us new ones.

The family’s sewing machine lived most of the year beneath my parents’ bed in Jubilation House’s only bedroom: tiny and plank-walled, with a backup generator in the closet. We kids slept in the attic. Finley and I in our sailor hammocks, Temperance in a toddler bed propped up on caribou antlers. Each morning we clattered down the ladder to brush our teeth together in the family’s shared bathroom: walls the color of arsenic, our pipes squealing while suctioning fresh water from the cistern bolted beneath the house.

After we’d all changed into dry clothes, we carried our bowls to the table on the veranda. Our mother relayed the full story of the rescue as we slurped our soup: Finley had been backstroking, ebbing with the current, when his heel struck something immobile. He put his head under the water and there, marooned just below the surface: the Bloomer Napoleon pianoforte.

“And you thought to yourself, Aha,” our mother said, blowing on her spoon.

“—and I thought to myself, Aha,” said my brother.

The Napoleon was a musical treasure heirloomed to our family’s ancestors and lost on the original homesteading trail many generations earlier. A barmy, sepia-tinted photo of the pianoforte hung in our living room alongside a nine-foot grizzly bear skin from the same expedition. In the photo, our great-great-great-great-grandfather Moose Bloomer—just a young boy then—draped a protective arm around the Napoleon’s music stand. Behind Moose the pianoforte’s lid was propped open to showcase solid gold hammers molded into the shape of tulips. To the modern viewer the Napoleon was, clearly, already the star of the shot—hickory-smoked, flutes sweeping up to mirror the family’s hopes for a better life on their new parcel of deeded Arctic land.

That hope had never bled out. Though stability remained one of the scarcest resources the Territory of the Arctic had to offer, it hadn’t stopped Finley from turning his eyes back two hundred years to the original pianofortes in the hopes that they might once again save us. He’d dove below the waves and embraced the forte’s body. A piano nobody had seen in centuries yet I could picture the scene as clearly as if I’d seen it myself: the forte blackened with mold, my brother’s miserable pluck.

Our mother swept the air with her arms as she pantomimed swimming to rescue him. Sharp-finned strokes. She spoke fast, almost out of breath, telling the story: “I had to get to him.” I could see that her hand was shaking, just slightly; the rescue had shaken her. She mimed putting her head under the water. “There he was, I could see him,” she said, and described spotting Finley wrapped around the the piano’s body, the pair of them barrel-rolling toward the drop of the continental shelf.

Finley pushed away his bowl. “You know I only needed like one more minute to bring her up,” he said. “It was a premature evacuation.”

“One more minute and we would’ve been mourning your funeral. You were sucking sea water,” I said.

“You don’t know, you weren’t down there.”

I watched Temperance fetch the sack of marbles she’d gotten for her fourth birthday and shoot them down the veranda. She cheered when they reached a hole and plopped into the sea. “I know what drowning looks like. You keep diving like that and that’s where you’re headed,” I said.

“I don’t need a chaperone,” said Finley, crossing his arms.

I grabbed his bowl and stacked it atop my own; clatter clatter, too loud.

“Kids,” said our father. “Can’t we all just enjoy being alive together for one minute? Relish that? For thirty seconds?”

Nearby, Jubilation House’s generator thrummed, a grinding mash of cogs that drowned out our voices. High on the roofline, solar panels powered down. Seas sloshed underfoot. The farm’s seaweed braids stretched from the veranda’s railing all the way to the roof’s peak—this was where we clipped up our farm’s catches as they dried: octopus fry, mussels for pickling, hops, kelp ribboned like lasagna. All flapped overhead like prayer flags.

The sale of these crops was a small part of how we afforded our family farm’s existence; the rest came from our mother flying charters. We ate what grew in the earth beds that circled the veranda and harvested crops from the fjord’s floor. Salt berries, brineweed, cucumbers julienned for salads. In our free time we dove for artifacts that could be traded at Disillusionment Trade Post for soy sauce and panels to recharge batteries.

After dinner, we went inside for bedtime tea. My mother lit a burner for hot water and got down the samovar. I opened the tea jar and scooped out a family serving. Home-grown, the herbs irritated my gums. We sipped from our cups, brushed our teeth, and then we kids climbed the ladder to the attic. As soon as the hatch had closed behind us Finley flicked on a flashlight and pulled The Big Book of Homesteader Crests out from underneath his quilt. The book was the closest thing the territory had to an encyclopedia of pianofortes. It would be years before copies circulated across the territory, and beyond to the continent—by then our sleepy, off-grid fish town of Disillusionment Bay was barely recognizable. That future was still to come, though looking back, it seems clear that my family’s coming misfortune had its genesis that October night.

I pulled my quilt up to my chin as light from the attic’s windows refracted through the sea lion’s bones. When we were little, our parents made us wear bells around our ankles, secured with locks, so they could hear where we were in case we fell off the veranda when no one was looking. A whimsical security, but a security nonetheless. Only when the bells stopped chiming did they have to worry. Now that Finley and I were old enough to swim on our own, I realized, we did so without a bell choir chorus; either of us could dive and never resurface.

“It could have been some other family’s Napoleon,” I said.

Finley clicked off his flashlight. “It wasn’t.”

When I awoke the next morning, Finley was gone from his hammock. This wasn’t unusual—my brother often went for a sunrise swim with Abraham Lincoln. I descended the ladder expecting to find the rest of our family at breakfast. Typically my parents fried herring roe with the eggs they scooped, warm, from the chickens we kept cooped on the western side of the veranda. The door to the veranda stood open, and I could see the rest of my family had gathered around the outside eating table. Stretched across it was the Banana, the bright yellow double-hatch kayak that Finley and I shared.

Immediately I spotted a deep crack snaking the length of the Banana’s hull. The worst breach I’d ever seen. Though our family had other kayaks, the Banana was the only double-hatch, and the only one Finley and I were allowed to paddle outside the fjord by ourselves. A deep crack meant it would be out of the water for weeks. Now we’d both be stuck at home until it was repaired.

I ran a hand lightly along the cut. The damage was not clean and fiberglass slivered my fingers. “What happened?” I said.

“How am I supposed to magically see an underwater boulder?” Finley said, all huff and bluster. “Up it comes—whoosh—from nowhere.”

“So you did this,” I said.

“It’s called an accident, Mills.”