The Pugilist and the Sailor by Nadia Ragbar

In the highly original novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor, Nadia Ragbar delves into the world of two conjoined twin brothers, each with distinct personalities and interests. Dougie is the easy-going extrovert brother who works security for a grocery store and competes as a semi-professional boxer. At thirty-four years old, he is nearing the end of his window as a competitor. He trains hard, runs, and watches his diet—all activities which his brother Bruce is forced to participate in. More of an introvert, Bruce works as a bookkeeper, has romantic sensibilities and dreams of circumnavigation.

As Dougie is preparing for an important boxing match against Patrice, Bruce has become captivated by Anka, a young woman he observed in the library. Bruce sends Anka a letter and the two enter into a correspondence, sharing deep and personal reflections about the world around them but without disclosing some rather important details. Anka is working through profound grief, having lost both parents in a car accident. Feeling unmoored without them, Ragbar describes Anka’s thoughts when looking out the window at the Southern Ontario landscape:

This was the only infrastructure and ocean of land that she had ever existed in, but she didn’t recognize anything of herself in these contours. She didn’t feel connected to what she saw out her window, surfaces that held no depths for her. Not in the way her parents felt about Guyana. For both her mother and father, their selfhood and national pride were inextricably linked to the taste of fruits from their neighbours’ trees, the particular vibrancy that radiated from the green and blue and yellow and pink and heat of everything alive in their memories. They were formed from that clay; everything around them in the atmosphere had swirled into the double-helix deep inside them…

Anka then undertakes to take control of her grief by knitting an oversized rug for her apartment that maps out the rivers and water courses of the city. The pervasive presence of loss continues to shadow the book as Ragbar introduces us to Jane, the boys’ mother. Jane was raised without a mother, and although her life was marked by that early bereavement, she embraces her own motherhood with joy and love, crudely altering clothes to fit her sons who are joined at the waist, share one leg, and each with one adult-sized arm and one child-sized arm.

As Kristof works on his ambitious project, the suit’s description becomes a lovely metaphor for the twins: two entirely distinct garments being held together in co-operation and contention.

An important boxing match is held with Patrice, yet despite Dougie’s preparations, the fight somehow goes awry, and the referee declares Patrice the winner. The setback for Dougie is complicated by anger and frustration. Bruce meanwhile has tired of the boxing life and is beginning to dream of being physically separated from his brother. Although such thoughts fill him with guilt and panic, he longs for the opportunity to explore complete independence.

The possibility of an operation, the potential of starting a new life, meant hurting the person he loved the most. But not having his own life was becoming painful.

The boys are approached by an older gentleman, Kristof, a retired tailor now living with his daughter. Widowed and missing his beloved wife, Kristof offers to make the twins a beautiful suit. He knows that it will be his greatest challenge and also his final masterwork. As Kristof works on his ambitious project, the suit’s description becomes a lovely metaphor for the twins: two entirely distinct garments being held together in co-operation and contention.

An accomplished debut novel with rich characterization and a compelling narrative voice. Recommended.

Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel.

Publisher: Invisible Publishing (September 16th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 5″ | 240 pp
ISBN: 9781778430718

Lucy E. M. Black

Website

Lucy E.M. Black (she/her/hers) is the author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella’s Carpet, The Brickworks and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth. A Quilting of Scars will be released October 2025. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada. She is a dynamic workshop presenter, experienced interviewer and freelance writer. She lives with her partner in the small lakeside town of Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.