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What do we stand to lose in a world without ice? A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer in residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world's most enigmatic continent, Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth which is nobody's country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil's years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent. In the spirit of the diaries of A...
From the author of Ice Diaries, winner of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival Grand Prize, praised by the New York Times as "stunningly written" and a Guardian Best Book of 2018. An unflinching exploration of love and boundaries in Brexit-crazed London. Richard Cottar is a respected independent film writer and director; his wife, Joanna, is his increasingly successful and wealthy producer. Together they are about to embark on a film about the life of Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who killed himself in northern Spain while on the run from the Nazis in 1940. In what looks set to be the last year of Britain's membership of the European Union, Benjamin's story of exile an...
Uncover the darker side of paradise. A moody, sensual novel about forbidden passion and terrorism on the Indian ocean coast of east Africa.
In 2016, Helen, an historian, and David, a government official, journey to a slowly disintegrating Antarctic. Helen goes in search of a story. Three years before their journey, Nara, a young scientist, disappeared from an Antarctic base; she is presumed dead, though her body has never been recovered. When an international emergency forces Helen and David to over-winter in the Antarctic, a more complex story than the official record emerges – of what happened to Nara, the pilot Luke and Nara’s lover Alexander, and of what is happening to the ice. Sitting at Nara’s desk, reading her diaries on a snowed-in Antarctic base, Helen wonders if the ice will ever give up its secrets.
Contains an essay on the psychology and origins of masochism called Coldness and cruelty by G Deleuze and the novel Venus in furs by L von Sacher-Masoch.
Jean McNeil's first novel, HUNTING DOWN HOME, was widely praised for its 'knife-edged lyricism' and exquisite language. With this collection of stories, she returns to form with thirteen startling tales of longing and arbitrary lives. In 'Once Seen', a young woman in London constructs her own yearnings through ads in the Once Seen columns. In 'Beach Boy', Ignacio struggles to recall an earlier childhood, and a mother in the northern hemisphere who wants him back. A once successful writer seeks to revitalise his career through tracing the journeys and illicit loves of his famous travel writer friend in 'Cachoeira'. Set in Canada, Britain, France and Central America, each story is a whole world in itself, perfectly created in precise, sensuous language.
Life, says Eve’s father, is a never-ending loop, like a journey of the eels he fishes, repeating endlessly from the Sargasso Sea to Seal Island, again and again. I don’t want to be a part of this rigid continuum, think Eve as a young girl—Let me be the one to break the cycle. Now Eve is in her mid-thirties and she has come home to Cape Breton, to Clam Harbour, to take care of her father. A barracuda of a real estate agent is already circling—there are Americans and Germans who want part of this gorgeous landscape. But there are still too many memories here and Eve knows very well that memory is not safe. Noel, an American, has moved into the abandoned cottage next door. He, too, is h...
A thrilling and propulsive novel of an Antarctica expedition gone wrong and its far-reaching consequences for the explorers and their families "leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story" (Hilary Mantel). Remember the training: find shelter or make shelter, remain in place, establish contact with other members of the party, keep moving, keep calm. Robert 'Doc' Wright, a veteran of Antarctic surveying, was there on the ice when the worst happened. He holds within him the complete story of that night—but depleted by the disaster, Wright is no longer able to communicate the truth. Instead, in the wake of the catastrophic expedition, he faces the most da...
Hunting Down Home is the compelling story of an unusual family and their last year together. Morag lives with her grandparents on a remote farm in Nova Scotia. She sees her mother only in slides sent from Africa and illuminated at night on the white refrigerator door. With lyrical intensity, Jean McNeil captures Morag's dawning perception of the violent bonds that hold her grandparents together, making readers feel the tension when Morag must inevitably choose between them.
When NGO worker Nick drops unexpectedly into the lives of Pieter and Sara Lisson, he feels he has found the parents he never had. Nick then meets Riaan, the Lissons' son, and so begins an intense connection that threatens to erupt into a relationship neither had ever considered.