Author(s): Rosie Thomas

World fiction

An epic love story and adventure set against the harsh, beautiful background of Antarctica.
Alice is a scientist: she relies on method, precision, proof. But when her relationship with Oxford artist Peter Brown collapses spectacularly, she is forced to evaluate her own life for the first time. In her thirties, childless, tied to Oxford by her work, it is time to break away. Alice's mother, Margaret Mather, is famous as an adventuring anthropologist, one of the first women in Antarctica many years before. Alice accepts an invitation to go in Margaret's place to the southernmost point of the earth, and stay there for months, away from the world that has let her down. Little does she expect the strangeness of a place coloured blue and white, lit by an unearthly permanent sunlight. And nothing has prepared her for the close confines of a small base shared with eight men and one other woman. A base where tensions run high, where the hostile environment traps them, and where the distance means no-one has a past. Recommended as a good read by Vicky Williams