Letters From The Arctic

The Arctic beckons from the edge, at the limits of our geographic knowledge and civilized souls, nudging our guilty consciences ever so lightly when we read about melting ice and rising sea levels.

It is also a place of mind. This is the story of Marianne, the tangled paths that led her onto a ship headed north, and the events that followed, involving bears, glaciers, mountains and several crossings of the Barents Sea.

Twenty years after her first landfall she has returned to Svalbard, the desolate islands clustered halfway between Norway's northern tip and the North Pole.

In an interweaving of past and present, she calls on local residents, a dead poet, old friends and an estranged lover, seeking to understand the currents that have transformed both herself and the place she used to call home. Inspired by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice's Letters From Iceland, this blend of letters, drawings, anecdotes and poems - including a mordant take on climate speculation seen through the lens of Aristophanes' comedy The Birds - invites the reader on a journey of reflection on self, society and the environment.