Antarctic Navigation

The dazzling landscape central to this multifaceted tale of adventure and aspiration is the white Antarctic vastness known as the Ice. The story told is of an exhibition to the South Pole, led by a young, ardent American woman, Morgan Lamont - an expedition inspired and haunted by the tragic journey, eighty years before, of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. For Morgan, Scott's life, his dream, his death, and the very concept of Antarctic navigation are obsessive emblems of the search for integrity in a morally precarious age. Freed by her mother's quixotic and frightening sacrifice and the generosity of a hitherto estranged grandfather, she sets out to fulfil her own dream - to 'vindicate' Scott by recreating his historic polar expedition. At once extravagant and austere, pulsing with colour and detail against the stark Antarctic ice, this is a novel as singular as the continent it reveals. It is a work whose authenticity, storytelling force and metaphorical richness - immersing us in the world of Antarctic exploration - illumine both meaning of the century now ending and the power of the human spirit to navigate the new and unknown.