Overview

'A powerful and subtle writer...a remarkable novel' Spectator 'Chilling and tragic' Ruth Rendell In the waning years of the Edwardian era, a group of gentlemen wait out a raging blizzard in the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter, poised for a strike at the South Pole. As the storm lifts, a new challenge faces Captain Sir Eugene Stewart - to discover which of his twenty-five carefully chosen men has become a murderer. The quest for adventure has become a quest for justice.

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His story is tightly reined: terse, ironic, reflective. His depiction of Edwardian innocence and stuffiness crashing against the Antarctic void is superb Washington Post The solution is as astonishing as it is inevitable, the denouement chilling and tragic Ruth Rendell The period gives this book its strength and character ... altogether an admirable accomplishment New Yorker The absolute dark, absolute cold of the Antarctic is skilfully evoked Sunday Times A powerful and subtle writer ... a remarkable novel Spectator I was riveted by this tale of a man fighting the elements and his fellow explorers Daily Telegraph Highly original and deeply moving Observer

His story is tightly reined: terse, ironic, reflective. His depiction of Edwardian innocence and stuffiness crashing against the Antartic void is superb Washington Post The solution is as astonishing as it is inevitable, the denouement chilling and tragic Ruth Rendell The period gives this book its strength and character ... altogether an admirable accomplishment New Yorker The absolute dark, absolute cold of the Antartic is skilfully evoked Sunday Times A powerful and subtle writer ... a remarkable novel Spectator I was riveted by this tale of a man fighting the elements and his fellow explorers Daily Telegraph

Highly original and deeply moving * Observer * I was riveted by this tale of a man fighting the elements and his fellow explorers * Daily Telegraph * A powerful and subtle writer . . . a remarkable novel * Spectator * The absolute dark, absolute cold of the Antarctic is skilfully evoked * Sunday Times * The period gives this book its strength and character . . . altogether an admirable accomplishment * New Yorker * The solution is as astonishing as it is inevitable, the denouement chilling and tragic * Ruth Rendell * His story is tightly reined: terse, ironic, reflective. His depiction of Edwardian innocence and stuffiness crashing against the Antarctic void is superb * Washington Post *

Australian Keneally, a restless genre-explorer, now composes an inventive, fullblown Edwardian mystery novel set on the Antarctic ice cap, rich in effects and dazzle, short on emotional impact. Sir Anthony Piers, once dashing but now 92 and in a Los Angeles rest home overlooking the geriatric township called Sageworld, is recalling the trek with the New British South Polar Expedition in 1910 on which he was the official artist. Flashback. The young Piers is an oil painter and watercolorist with a crush on Turner landscapes, and Captain Sir Eugene Stewart thinks him ideal for capturing the long midnight lights. Also along are a photographer-cinematographer and a journalist whose productions - along with Piers' - are meant to subsidize the expedition with sales later. After six months on the cap, though, journalist Victor Henneker is murdered. Who of this utterly isolated party would kill the muckraking homosexual? Could the murderer be Forbes-Chalmers, weird survivor from a disastrous earlier expedition, the phantom figure sometimes spotted afar? Old Piers' analyses of the trek's members has an added zinger: he now knows (65 years later!) just what happened to all of them through the rest of their lives, and this double-whammy knowledge adds a sort of aura to each suspect. Suavely magnetic at -80 , with brutal aurorae and aglow with talent, but a strangely unambitious effort for the likes of T. Keneally. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published more than thirty novels since. They include Schindler's Ark, which won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was subsequently made into the film Schindler's List, and The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates and Gossip From The Forest, each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including his memoir Homebush Boy, Searching for Schindler and Australians. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney.

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