October 8, 2025

The Pugilist and the Sailor, by Nadia Ragbar

Imagine the impossible conundrum: a set of brothers, conjoined twins, and one’s entire existence is bound up in being a boxer, while the other just wants to read a story of a sailor all alone at sea. How do you reconcile that? A question that serves as jumping off point for Nadia Ragbar’s debut novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor, the story of the Reuben brothers, Bruce and Dougie, but which is also a meditation that draws into the narrative the boys’ loving parents, their neighbours, their co-workers, and a benevolent tailor determined to make the brothers a new suit. Ragbar’s story is a rich imagining of Bruce and Dougie’s physical experience—how they walk into a room, the way they sleep, how one brother hovers inside a door to give the other a bit of privacy to (maybe!) kiss a girl goodnight. And the boxing too, where the brothers are known as The Reuben Beat, two fists and three legs, a force to be reckoned with, except that Bruce doesn’t want to do it any longer, and Dougie has been having troubling neurological symptoms. Meanwhile, Bruce has been exchanging letters with a woman in the neighbourhood who has been overwhelmed by her own grief, but he hasn’t informed her yet of his physical situation, and the narrative encompasses her own point of view, and that of the brothers’ mother, Jane, who made her own choices when her sons were born, and might have to let go of her conviction that these were the best ones for them, that her sons were perfect as they were and they’d have to have the world bend to meet them rather than the other way around. Which has served them well, until now, and this is a story of holding on and letting go, and about the connections that persist in spite of unfathomable distances, a generous, human, and most moving read.