Why did I love this book?
What kind of person dreams of months of frozen winter darkness?
In 1934 Christiane Ritter set off for a remote hut in the Arctic with her husband and Karl, a hunter, to spend a year in the ice far from her luxurious city life in Austria.
She imagines a cosy retreat until she sees the hut and the horrifyingly basic conditions they’ll live in – just to get water for their first meal involves an hour and a half’s trek to a glacier, even the potatoes freeze, and she hadn’t expected to be left completely alone for weeks as the men go hunting.
It's beautiful though, and Ritter is resilient, which makes her description of the intensely disorienting experience of the season of winter darkness all the more powerful. I recommend reading this tucked up by a warm fire on a cold night!
4 authors picked A Woman in the Polar Night as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"Conjures the rasp of the skin runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights..." Sara Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
"Ritter manages to articulate all the terrible beauty and elemental power of a polar winter" Gavin Francis, author of Empire Antarctica
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least,…