I’ve had a lifelong passion for all things Arctic that began in childhood as I devoured many tragic tales of doomed Arctic explorers. This fascination later merged with concern for human impacts on this fragile ecosystem. Though I hate the cold and suffer from vertigo, I participated in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition that sailed Svalbard’s western shores. Among other experiences, I witnessed a massive glacier calving and walked on an ice floe. Determined to fully absorb Svalbard’s setting for my creative work, I spent two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen—one in the dark season and one as the light returned—and I signed on for another expedition to circumnavigate the archipelago.
I’d rank this novel in my top five of all time, not just as a great survival story.
This book is a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel set partly in Antarctica, a meditation on human existence, and a page-turner with keen attention to beautiful writing. Its characters grapple with essential, existential questions such as: How are we connected to the world? What happens when those last connections are broken? What is the nature of loneliness, of love? Is survival alone enough reason for living?
I’ve read this novel several times, and though I know the arc of the story and the fate of its characters, I come away each time with insights into what it means to be alive. A bonus: it’s one of the few novels I know of set in Antarctica.
From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between.
The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped…
Like Brockmeier’s book, this book is in my top-five all-time novels. I can fall in love with a novel purely for its language, and Barrett’s ability to describe the settings her characters encounter is unparalleled. It, too, has a rare polar setting, this time aboard the ship the Narwhal bound for the Arctic in 1855 to find the remains of a previous, lost expedition. So visceral are her descriptions that they put me right back in the Arctic.
She’s also masterful at interleaving science and history with her characters’ desires without becoming didactic. One of her protagonists, the scholar-naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells, screens the world and his philosophical musings through the lens of his scientific inclinations. I admire novels that manage to teach me something while not feeling as if the author is desperate to cram all the research s/he has acquired into the book. Barrett succeeds in avoiding this pitfall.
It is also great historical fiction: at once a love story and a mystery, full of surprises but also a deep understanding of human nature.
Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration-the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic-Andrea Barrett's compelling novel tells the story of a fateful expedition. Through the eyes of the ship's scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells, we encounter the Narwhal's crew, its commander, and the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we meet the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery, finally discovering what they had not sought, the secrets of their own hearts.
I’m obsessed with the story of S. A. Andrée and his ill-fated attempt to sail over the North Pole in the balloon Eagle in 1897. My bookshelf is jammed with non-fictional accounts of this flight—and the tragedy that befell the three men aboard.
Because much is unknown about exactly what happened to these men, Sundman created this fictional story of the flight, from its takeoff on Danes Island on the western side of Svalbard to the balloon’s crash onto the ice near the North Pole to the men’s perilous journey over ice ending on Kvitøya (White Island) on the eastern side of Svalbard. Doubly tragic: they were so painfully close to salvation but unable to cross the sea to a more hospitable landing site on Svalbard.
I’m also incredibly curious about why explorers risk their lives for uncertain gain. This novel helps reveal the daring but also narcissistic motivations of men like Andrée, that combination of recklessness and courage that fueled the age of discovery.
I’m a fan of speculative fiction and those rare novels set on Svalbard. This novel satisfies both cravings.
Spurred by a desire to change his life, Jack Miller joins an expedition to northern Svalbard in January 1937 and is abandoned by his companions as the dark season approaches. Paver mines the psychological page-turning quality of a great ghost story with beautiful language and palpable descriptions of the Arctic landscape and its natural wonders.
Left alone, Jack must deal with loneliness and isolation and their effects on his psyche. It’s hard to avoid such themes when you’re dealing with an extreme setting like the High Arctic, especially during the months of total darkness, but they are themes that make me think about the great philosophical questions such as how one finds meaning in life.
'What is it? What does it want? Why is it angry with me?'
January 1937.
Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to be the wireless operator on an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken. But the Arctic…
I enjoy the “based on a true story” feel of this novel, even though it’s purely a product of Harding’s imagination. A historical novel set in 1616, the story centers upon a headstrong English whaler—Thomas Cave—who, on a bet, stays behind alone on an Arctic island in the Svalbard archipelago to endure the dark season. More threatening than carving out an existence in a forbidding environment is the effect of isolation on Cave, whom we see through excerpts from his diary.
I hadn’t realized until I wrote this list how possessed I am by novels set in extreme environments and also—not surprisingly—ones whose themes arise from that obsession: the nature of loneliness and the effects of isolation. I’m a fan of layered narratives as well—akin to the kind of framed narrative found in Heart of Darkness.
Cave’s diary entries are embedded within the voice of a first-person narrator who sets out to understand Cave’s motivations and the effect that the extreme winter setting had on his psyche.
August, 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured high into the Arctic, but now must begin the long journey home. Only one man stays behind: Thomas Cave makes a wager to remain here, alone, until the next season. No man has yet been known to survive a winter this far north. As the light recedes and the ice begins to close in, Cave pits himself against blizzards, avalanches, bears - and his own demons. For in this wilderness that is without human history his past returns to him: the woman he had loved, the grief that drove him to the…
My book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway. Beyond enduring the Arctic winter’s twenty-four-hour night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold, as well as Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy.
The novel concerns the impact of humans on pristine environments, the isolation of mental illness, the consolation of religious faith, and the solace of storytelling.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
