The Ice-Cold Heaven - Hardcover

Bonne, Mirko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715645846 ISBN 13: 9780715645840

Publisher: Overlook Duckworth, 2013

Synopsis

August 1914. While the Great War rears its head across Europe, Sir Ernest Shackleton begins a daring expedition. He aims to be the first to cross the Antarctic on foot. Together with him on his ship Endurance are 69 sled dogs, a gramophone, a bicycle - and a stowaway. Hidden amidst oil skins and sea boots, 17-year-old Merce Blackboro is on his way to the South Pole. Their journey into the ice is by way of the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. But the Antarctic summer is short, and their passage remains resolutely closed to them. In the Weddell Sea the Endurance is trapped for months in pack ice and finds itself delivered up to an uncertain fate. An odyssey full of privations through the vastness of the south polar sea now begins for the 28 members of the expedition. Shackleton's unwavering optimism holds them together, and they are driven on by cold, hunger and their hopes of being rescued. Gripping right up to the very last page, Ice-Cold Heaven is a modern adventure story played out in glass-sharp polar air and bursting with vitality in its characters and their stories.In a language at once precise and poetic, Mirko Bonne's novel traces Shackleton's legendary Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition through the ice and explores the relationships between these men who were lost to the world for 635 days.

About this title

About the Author

Mirko Bonne,born 1965 in Tegernsee, lives in Hamburg. He has translated poetry by Keats, e.e.cummings and W. B. Yeats, and has published several novels and volumes of poetry. His novel Wie Wir Verschwinden was longlisted for the German Book Award.

Review

'Our hands get chapped while we turn the pages to follow the adventures of Merce Blackboro - this young German writer delivers a hallucinatory tableau, arousing and startling' Le Figaro 'Within the best tradition of the classic adventure novel; an intriguing, enthralling book based on a true story' Frankfurter Rundschau

Edition details

• Publisher: Overlook Duckworth
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0715645846
• ISBN 13: 9780715645840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432