Why am I passionate about this?
I did not set out to write six books about Arctic exploration. By the mid-1990s, while working full-time as a journalist, I had published three novels. I proposed to become a celebrated novelist. But then, during a three-month stint at the University of Cambridge, I discovered Arctic explorer John Raeāand that he had been denied his rightful recognition by Charles Dickens and other leading Victorians. I researched Raeās story, marked his greatness in the Arctic, and celebrated him in Fatal Passage. It took me two decades and five more Arctic books to solve the great mystery while also publishing ten books on other subjects. Call me a compulsive scribbler.
Ken's book list on lost Franklin Expedition
Why did Ken love this book?
This is the classic introduction to Franklinās 1845 expedition. On Beechey Island, Owen Beattie conducted autopsies on the bodies of the first three sailors to die. John Geiger tells the story so clearly that he opens the door to interpretations at odds with his own.
At the northern tip of King William Island, believing he had no option, Franklin turned southwest into āthe continuously replenished pack-ice.ā He sailed into a lethal trap, one āmade all the more cruel with the realization that the route along the eastern coast of the island regularly clears during the summer.ā Here, I realized that Geiger was referencing the strait John Rae discovered in 1854, which, fifty years later, Roald Amundsen would vindicate as the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage.
3 authors picked Frozen in Time as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
āA remarkable piece of forensic deduction.āāMargaret Atwood
The internationally-bestselling account of the Franklinās doomed Arctic expedition, and the thrilling scientific investigation that spurred the decades-long hunt for its recoveryānow with a new afterword on the discovery of its lost ships: Erebus and Terror.
āChilling . . . will keep you up nights turning pages.āāThe Chicago Tribune
In 1845, Sir John Franklin and his men set out to āpenetrate the icy fastness of the north, and to circumnavigate America.ā And then they disappeared. The truth about what happened to Franklinās ill-fated Arctic expedition was shrouded in mystery for more than aā¦