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Books Set in a Cold Climate |
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Animal life
by Auður A. Ólafsdóttir
"From winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the Icelandic Literary Prize, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, comes a dazzling novel about a family of midwives set in the run-up to Christmas in Iceland. In the days leading up to Christmas, Dómhildur delivers her 1,922nd baby. Beginnings and endings are her family trade; she comes from a long line of midwives on her mother's side and a long line of undertakers on her father's. She even lives in the apartment that she inherited from her grandaunt, a midwife with a unique reputation for her unconventional methods. As a terrible storm races towards Reykjavík, Dómhildur discovers decades worth of letters and manuscripts hidden amongst her grandaunt's clutter. Fielding calls from her anxious meteorologist sister and visits from her curious new neighbour, Dómhildur escapes into her grandaunt's archive and discovers strange and beautiful reflections on birth, death, and human nature. With her singular warmth and humor, in Animal Life Ólafsdóttir gives us a beguiling novel that comes direct from the depths of an Icelandic winter, full of hope for spring"
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The end of drum-time : a novel
by Hanna Pylväinen
An epic love story about a young reindeer herder and a minister's daughter in the 19th century Arctic Circle.
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The darkness : a thriller
by Ragnar Jónasson
"Spanning the icy streets of Reykjavik, the Icelandic highlands and cold, isolated fjords, The Darkness is an atmospheric thriller from Ragnar Jonasson, one of the most exciting names in Nordic Noir. The body of a young Russian woman washes up on an Icelandic shore. After a cursory investigation, the death is declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed. Over a year later Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police is forced into early retirement at 64. She dreads the loneliness, and the memories of her dark past that threaten to come back to haunt her. But before she leaves she is given two weeks to solve a single cold case of her choice. She knows which one: the Russian woman whose hope for asylum ended on the dark, cold shore of an unfamiliar country. Soon Hulda discovers that another young woman vanished at the same time, and that no one is telling her the whole story. Even her colleagues in the police seem determined to put the brakes on her investigation. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. Hulda will find the killer, even if it means putting her own life in danger"
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The pastor
by Hanne Ørstavik
"Liv is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes. As a student of theology in Germany, she researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people during the 1800s. Liv excavates their past and her own, searching formeaning in a scene of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain. With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise. She wonders how "language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending," and slowly, she bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing"
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The blue fox
by Sjón
An elusive fox leads a hunter on a transformative quest, while a naturalist endeavors to build a life for a young woman with Down syndrome whom he rescued from a shipwreck years earlier
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The Unseen
by Roy Jacobsen
Shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize • Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award • "Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read."―Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
Born on the Norwegian island that bears her name, Ingrid Barrøy’s world is circumscribed by storm-scoured rocks and the moods of the sea by which her family lives and dies. But her father dreams of building a quay that will end their isolation, and her mother longs for the island of her youth, and the country faces its own sea change: the advent of a modern world, and all its unpredictability and violence. Brilliantly translated into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is the first book in the Barrøy Chronicles and a moving exploration of family, resilience, and fate.
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Island
by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen
A young Danish woman explores her family's past and Faroe Islands ancestry across three generations. In the process she uncovers details of the passions and challenges her grandparents and their siblings confronted when they were her age, and considers universal themes of home and identity.
Lush, lyrical prose transports the reader.
Family brings the young woman back to the Faroe Islands - the windswept, rocky northern archipelago where she has never lived but which she has always called home. There she finds her stories entwining with those of her ancestors as she searches for a way to connect with the culture and her kin. Rooted in the wild beauty of the islands and the author's own history, this is a bewitching tale of exile, homecoming, and what it means to belong.
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The snow child : a novel
by Eowyn Ivey
A childless couple working a farm in the brutal landscape of 1920 Alaska discover a little girl living in the wilderness, with a red fox as a companion, and begin to love the strange, almost-supernatural child as their own.
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Growth of the soil
by Knut Hamsun
When it was first published in 1917, Growth of the Soil was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. Ninety years later it remains a transporting literary experience. In the story of Isak, who leaves his village to clear a homestead and raise a family amid the untilled tracts of the Norwegian back country, Knut Hamsun evokes the elemental bond between humans and the land. Newly translated by the acclaimed Hamsun scholar Sverre Lyngstad, Hamsun's novel is a work of preternatural calm, stern beauty, and biblical power—and the crowning achievement of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
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The nine tailors
by Dorothy L. Sayers
The nine tellerstrokes from the belfry of an ancient country church toll out the death of an unknown man and call the famous Lord Peter Whimsey to investigate the good and evil that lurks in every person. Steeped in the atmosphere of a quiet parish in the strange, flat fen-country of East Anglia, this is a tale of suspense, character, and mood by an author critics and readers rate as one of the great masters of the mystery novel.
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The Rabbit Back Literature Society
by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Only nine people have ever been chosen by renowned children's author Laura White to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a tenth member has been selected: a young literature teacher named Ella.
Soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual known as "The Game"? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura White's winter party? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves? Was there once another tenth member, before her? Slowly, as Ella explores the Society and its history, disturbing secrets that had been buried for years start to come to light. . . .
In Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen's chilling, darkly funny novel, The Rabbit Back Literature Society, praised as "Twin Peaks meets the Brothers Grimm" (The Telegraph), the uncanny brushes up against the everyday in the most beguiling and unexpected of ways.
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North : a novel
by Brad Kessler
"As a late spring blizzard brews, Brother Christopher, a cloistered monk at Blue Mountain Monastery in Vermont, rushes to tend to his Ida Red and Northern Spy apple trees in advance of the unseasonal snowstorm. When the storm lands a young Somali refugee, Sahro Abdi Muse, at the monastery, Christopher is pulled back into the world as his life intersects with Sahro's and that of an Afghan war veteran in surprising and revealing ways"
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Beartown : a novel
by Fredrik Backman
In a forgotten town fractured by scandal, an amateur hockey team might just be able to change everything. By the New York Times best-selling author of A Man Called Ove.
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Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author, a magnificent, epic novel—"funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant" (Annie Proulx)—at last available to contemporary American readers.
Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
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The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Surprising transformations take place when a newspaperman's elderly aunt and two daughters decide to move back to their family home on the coast of Newfoundland, in a Scribner's Classic release of Annie Proulx's award-winning novel.
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Winter : a novel
by Ali Smith
Four people converge on a house in Cornwall for Christmas, in a story that depicts in wry observations a bleak, post-truth era rooted in history, memory, art, and laughter at a time of endurance and survival
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The winter people : a novel
by Jennifer McMahon
Coming of age in an old farmhouse, 19-year-old Ruthie begins a search for her agoraphobic mother and discovers the century-old diary of the farmhouse's long-ago resident, a grieving mother who died under mysterious circumstances.
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A woman in the Polar night
by Christiane Ritter
In 1934, the Austrian painter Christiane Ritter travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen to spend a year with her husband, an explorer and researcher. They are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies... But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.
This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.
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Ice palace
by Tarjei Vesaas
How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary' Doris Lessing 'I'm surprised it isn't the most famous book in the world' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers 'She was close to the edge now: the ice laid its hand upon her' The schoolchildren call it the Ice Palace: a frozen waterfall in the Norwegian fjords transformed into a fantastic structure of translucent walls, sparkling towers and secret chambers. It fascinates two young girls, lonely Unn and lively Siss, who strike up an intense friendship. When Unn decides to explore the Ice Palace alone and doesn't return, Siss must try to cope with the loss of her friend without succumbing to a frozen world of her own making.
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Winter in the blood
by James Welch
"The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. Winter in the Blood is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it"
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A Girl in Winter
by Philip Larkin
This story of Katherine Lind and Robin Fennel, of winter and summer, of war and peace, of exile and holidays. Beautiful.
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People like them : a novel
by Samira Sedira
A prizewinning, "riveting" (The New York Times Book Review) psychological suspense novel inspired by a true story about a couple in an insular French village whose lives are upended when a family of outsiders moves in.
“Icy and chilling . . . In sharply drawn sentences, Sedira summons the beauty of a small French village, and the shocking acts of the people inside it.” —Flynn Berry, Edgar Award-winning and bestselling author of Under the Harrow and Northern Spy.
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To the Mountain
by Erik Raschke
Eleven–year–old Marshall lives in a remote juvenile center in Colorado, where he is bullied by the other boys, misunderstood by all of the staff except Leslie, and so overwhelmed by the sounds and smells in the cafeteria that getting his lunch is a daily terror. During a blizzard, an unexpected mishap for Marshall and Leslie leads to Marshall's disappearance into the wilderness. His father, Jace, knows that Marshall has gone searching for a secret on the mountain. To save Marshall, Jace must overcome not only the winter elements, but his own self–doubt in this tale of sacrifice, hope, and the bond between father and son.
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The Library of Ice : Readings from a Cold Climate
by Nancy Campbell
A wonderful book: Nancy Campbell is a fine storyteller with a rare physical intelligence. The extraordinary brilliance of her eye confers the reader a total immersion in the rimy realms she explores. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow — I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth’ Dan Richards, author of Climbing Days
A vivid and perceptive book combining memoir, scientific and cultural history with a bewitching account of landscape and place, which will appeal to readers of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and Olivia Laing.
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Arctic dreams : imagination and desire in a northern landscape
by Barry Holstun Lopez
A passionate tour of the Arctic landscape covers such topics as the aurora borealis, polar bears, killer whales, migrating icebergs, the region's indigenous people, and the author's spiritual experiences there. Winner of the National Book Award. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.
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Names for the sea : strangers in Iceland
by Sarah Moss
Novelist Sarah Moss recounts a year of living in Iceland with two small children, in the wake of the financial crisis and in the year the volcano erupted
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A line in the world : a year on the North Sea Coast
by Dorthe Nors
An author chronicles her year-long exploration of the North Sea Coast from Skagen, Denmark to the Wadden Sea Islands, tracing the area's history, geography, and culture, and reflects on her ancestral ties to the region.
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Winter pasture : one woman's journey with China's Kazakh herders
by Juan Li
An award-winning travel memoir from China documents how the author, a girl from the Altai Mountains, joined a Kazakh family of camel, sheep and cattle herders during their winter pasture migration from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains. Illustrations.
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Fifty Words for Snow
by Nancy Campbell
A delightful compendium that brings together language, culture and adventure through frozen landscapes as it shares the meanings behind 50 words for snow, gathered from around the globe." —The Herald
Snow. Every language has its own words for the magical, mesmerizing flakes that fall from the sky. In this exquisite exploration, writer and Arctic traveller Nancy Campbell digs deep into the meanings of fifty words for snow.
In Japanese we encounter yuki-onna—a ‘snow woman’ who drifts through the frosted land. In Icelandic it is hundslappadrífa—‘snowflakes as big as a dog’s paw’—that softly blanket the streets. And in Maori we meet Huka-rere— ‘one of the children of rain and wind.’
From mountain tops and frozen seas to city parks and desert hills, each of these linguistic snow crystals offers a whole world of myth and story—the perfect winter gift.
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The Copenhagen trilogy : Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen
Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.
Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up―in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.
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An African in Greenland
by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit is a testament both to the wonderful strangeness of the human species and to the surprising sympathies that bind us all.
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The broken road : from the Iron Gates to Mount Athos
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
"In the winter of 1933 eighteen-year-old Patrick ("Paddy") Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him the better part of a year. Decades later, when he was well over fifty, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, two works now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, delightful, and beautifully-written travel books of all time. The Broken Road is the longand avidly awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor's manuscripts by his prize-winning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor's books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds: in the The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy's diary from the winter of 1934, when he had reached Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for. Across the space of three quarters of century we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure"
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Cold : adventures in the world's frozen places
by Bill Streever
A narrative account of the author's forays into some of the world's coldest regions describes his encounters with splashing through an Arctic swimming hole, investigations into ancient and more recent ice ages, and examinations of animal hibernation habits.
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