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.

An African in Greenland

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In "This Cold Heaven" she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine.

Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.”

"This Cold Heaven" is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.


This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

A haunting, compelling historical novel," The Sea Road" is a daring retelling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. It is a world where the old Norse gods are still invoked even as Christianity gains favor, where the spirits of the dead roam the vast northern ice-fields, tormenting the living, and Viking explorers plunder foreign shores. Taking the accidental discovery of North America as its focal point, Gudrid's narrative describes a multilayered voyage into the unknown, all recounted with astonishing immediacy and rich atmospheric detail.

The Sea Road

She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love.  She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land.  And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime...

It happened in the Copenhagen snow.  A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building.  While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident.  But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own.  Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.  For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice....

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen--terrified, but intrigued--is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess.

A Certain Slant of Light (Light, #1)

On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious plane flew into a severe storm and vanished.

"Frozen in Time "tells the story of these crashes and the fate of the survivors, bringing vividly to life their battle to endure 148 days of the brutal Arctic winter, until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen brought them to safety. Mitchell Zuckoff takes the reader deep into the most hostile environment on earth, through hurricane-force winds, vicious blizzards, and subzero temperatures.

Moving forward to today, he recounts the efforts of the Coast Guard and North South Polar Inc. – led by indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza – who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew.

A breathtaking blend of mystery and adventure Mitchell Zuckoff's "Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II "is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and a tribute to the everyday heroism of the US Coast Guard.

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

THE END OF THE WORLD IS HEREUnlocking the secret of the Seven Ancient Wonders was only the beginning... After their thrilling exploits in Matthew Reilly's rampaging New York Times bestseller, "7 Deadly Wonders", supersoldier Jack West Jr. and his loyal team of adventurers are back, and now they face an all-but-impossible challenge.A mysterious ceremony in an unknown location has unraveled their work and triggered a catastrophic countdown that will climax in no less than the end of all life on Earth.But there is one last hope.If Jack and his team can find and rebuild a legendary ancient device known only as the "Machine," they might be able to ward off the coming armageddon. The only clues to locating this Machine, however, are held within the fabled Six Sacred Stones, long lost in the fog of history.And so the hunt begins for the Six Sacred Stones and the all-important knowledge they possess, but in the course of this wild adventure Jack and his team will discover that they are not the only ones seeking the Stones and that there might just be other players out there who don't want to see the world saved at all.From Stonehenge in England to the deserts of Egypt to the spectacular Three Gorges region of China, "The 6 Sacred Stones" will take you on a nonstop roller-coaster ride through ancient history, modern military hardware, and some of the fastest and most mind-blowing action you will ever read.

The Six Sacred Stones (Jack West Jr, #2)

Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders" "is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas. Set in the fourteenth century in Europe’s most far-flung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains, The Greenlanders" "is the story of one family–proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book. Jane Smiley takes us into this world of farmers, priests, and lawspeakers, of hunts and feasts and long-standing feuds, and by an act of literary magic, makes a remote time, place, and people not only real but dear to us.

The Greenlanders

"For sheer storytelling delight and pure adventure, "Treasure Island" has never been surpassed. From the moment young Jim Hawkins first encounters the sinister Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow Inn until the climactic battle for treasure on a tropic isle, the novel creates scenes and characters that have fired the imaginations of generations of readers. Written by a superb prose stylist, a master of both action and atmosphere, the story centers upon the conflict between good and evil - but in this case a particularly engaging form of evil. It is the villainy of that most ambiguous rogue Long John Silver that sets the tempo of this tale of treachery, greed, and daring. Designed to forever kindle a dream of high romance and distant horizons, "Treasure Island" is, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, 'the realization of an ideal, that which is promised in its provocative and beckoning map; a vision not only of white skeletons but also green palm trees and sapphire seas.' G. S. Fraser terms it 'an utterly original book' and goes on to write: 'There will always be a place for stories like "Treasure Island" that can keep boys and old men happy.'

Treasure Island

In the dark days of a Shetland winter, torrential rain triggers a landslide that crosses the main Lerwick-Sumburgh road and sweeps down to the sea.

At the burial of his old friend Magnus Tait, Jimmy Perez watches the flood of mud and peaty water smash through a croft house in its path. Everyone thinks the croft is uninhabited, but in the wreckage he finds the body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress. In his mind, she shares his Mediterranean ancestry and soon he becomes obsessed with tracing her identity.

Then it emerges that she was already dead before the landslide hit the house. Perez knows he must find out who she was, and how she died.

Cold Earth (Shetland Island, #7)

"You'll want to scratch." These spoken words open to us the strange and beguiling world of young Rudy Spruance, forced to join the military due to a mysterious past, and sent for some inexplicable reason to a top-secret military hospital in Greenland. There he meets a wide cast of unusual and colorful characters, outcasts and rejects all; begins to fall for the commanding officer's leggy and strong-willed girlfriend; and slowly uncovers the awful secret behind the portion of the base dubbed "the Wing."

No One Thinks of Greenland

Viewed from above, Greenland offers an endless vista of whiteness interrupted only by scattered ponds of azure-colored melt water. Ninety percent of Greenland is covered by ice; its ice sheet, the largest outside Antarctica, stretches almost 1,000 miles from north to south and 600 miles from east to west. But this stark view of ice and snow is changing -- and changing rapidly. Greenland's ice sheet is melting; the dazzling, photogenic display of icebergs breaking off Greenland's rapidly melting glaciers has become a tourist attraction. "The Fate of Greenland" documents Greenland's warming with dramatic color photographs and investigates episodes in Greenland's climate history for clues about what happens when climate change is abrupt rather than gradual.

Greenland's climate past and present could presage our climate future. Abrupt climate change would be cataclysmic: the melting of Greenland's ice shelf would cause sea levels to rise twenty-four feet worldwide; lower Manhattan would be underwater and Florida's coastline would recede to Orlando. The planet appears to be in a period of acute climate instability, exacerbated by carbon dioxide we pour into the atmosphere. As this book makes clear, it is in all of our interests to pay attention to Greenland.

The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change

"They were near the edge of the glacier. The sea beneath the helicopter was dense with pack ice. In front of them, the endless whiteness stretched as far as the light could reach. It hurt his eyes. Millions of white crystals. Except in one place. One spot. Right where the mummified Norseman had been found and Aqqalu had kept watch. There, the ice was glossy red."

When a mummified Viking corpse is discovered in a crevasse out on the edge of an ice sheet, journalist Matthew Cave is sent to cover the story. The next day the mummy is gone, and the body of the policeman who was keeping watch is found naked and flayed—exactly like the victims in a gruesome series of murders that terrified the remote town of Nuuk in the 1970s.

As Matt investigates, he is shocked by the deprivation and brutal violence the locals take for granted. Unable to trust the police, he begins to suspect a cover-up. It’s only when he meets a young Inuit woman, Tupaarnaq, convicted of killing her parents and two small sisters, that Matt starts to realise how deep this story goes—and how much danger he is in.

The Girl Without Skin (Grønland - Greenland #1)

The Thrall's Tale

Iceland in centuries past was a formidable place to live. Situated in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the edge of the inhabitable world, the nation was both isolated and abjectly poor. Centuries of colonisation translated into oppression and subjugation from the colonial overlords, and a hostile climate and repeated natural disasters meant that mere survival was a challenge to even the hardiest of souls. 

In these 50 miniature essays, Alda Sigmundsdottir writes about the Icelanders in centuries past in a light and humourous way, yet never without admiration and respect for the resilience and strength they showed in coping with conditions of adversity that are barely imaginable today. Their ways of interacting with the natural world are described, as are their sometimes tragic, sometimes ingenious, means of dealing with maltreatment and injustice from the church and other rulers. These forms of oppression include a trade monopoly imposed by Denmark that lasted nearly two centuries, a ban on dancing that lasted for a similar length of time, the forced dissolution of households when the breadwinner of the family died, the tyranny of merchants granted exclusive right to trade with the Icelanders, and the dreaded decrees of the Grand Judgement - a court of law that was set up to punish various offenses, real or imagined. 

Yet it is not only the “big picture” that is described in this book, but also the various smaller aspects that shed light on the daily life of the Icelanders of old. These include their ingenious ways of coping with lack, of preserving food, of finding shelter, of creating or admitting light into their homes, as well as the innumerable and sometimes wacky superstitions attached to various life events, big and small. The hilarious customs of hospitality and visiting are also described, as are some of the sexual activates of Icelanders in the past, their belief in elves and hidden people, sexual interactions with hidden people (!), ways of dealing with grief, interactions with foreigners, and much, much more. 

Today’s Iceland is a modern, cosmopolitan place, with one of the highest standards of living in the world. Yet less than a century ago, this paragon of equality and peace was the poorest society in Europe. The conditions of life described in this book are therefore not very distant from the Icelanders today, and many of the aspects described are still very much reflected in Iceland’s unique culture. For example, the harsh climate and isolation of the past meant that there was a serious lack of grains for food. Consequently the Icelanders devised ways to make breads and cakes that used very little flour. The Icelandic “pancake”, similar to a French crepe, is still very much a part of traditional Icelandic celebrations, as is the “laufabraud” - a wafer-thin, deep-fried bread that is traditionally eaten at Christmas. The Icelandic language is also rich with throwbacks to the past - for instance the Icelandic word for “windfall” is “hvalreki” which literally means “beached whale” - this because a single beached whale in the old days was usually enough to feed an entire district, or one household for a full year, something that was immensely welcome in a country where food was in short supply. 

In short, The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days is not only a funny, witty and wise expose on the Icelanders’ daily life in the past, it is also essential to understanding the Icelandic national character today.

The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid’s steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned—and expanded—the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse. 






 

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

A striking, fascinatingly told novel based on the harrowing true story of Minik, an Eskimo boy seized in the name of exploration and brought to New York at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1897, famed explorer Robert Peary took six Eskimos from their homes in Greenland to be "presented" to the American Museum of Natural History. Among the six were a father and a son. Soon, four were dead, including the father (whose bones, unbeknownst to the son, were put on display). One returned to Greenland. And the other -- the young boy -- remained, the only Eskimo in New York for twelve years.
 His name was Minik. This is his story. A story of lies and deceptions. A story about the price of exploration. A story about discovering the truth of a culture.


Smiler's Bones

Fridtjof Nansen journeyed across Greenland in 1888 - eight attempts before him failed. This edition removes the technical appendices. the historical sections on previous attempts to penetrate the fiedl, and the detailed account of the Eskimos. The record of the journey, however, remains intact.

The First Crossing Of Greenland

It is now generally accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland across the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent almost a thousand years ago, but what happened in this vast area during the next five hundred years has long been a source of disagreement among scholars. Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait.

The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields of inquiry: the history of medieval Greenland and its connections with the Norse discovery of North America, and fifteenth-century British maritime history and pre-colonial voyages to North America, including that of John Cabot. In order to evaluate the situation in Norse Greenland at the end of the fifteenth century (when documented English and Portuguese voyages of northern exploration began), the author follows the colony's development—its domestic economy and foreign trade and its cultural and ecclesiastical affinities—from its inception in the tenth century. In the process, she looks critically at commonly held views that have gone unchallenged until now.

Among the questions about which the author sets forth new evidence and conclusions are: the extent to which Greenlanders explored and exploited North America after Leif Eriksson, the reasons for the baffling disappearance of the Norse settlement in Greenland, the connection between their disappearance and the beginning of the voyages of exploration that began around A.D. 1500, the routes by which information concerning previous voyages traveled, the history before Cabot of the advance of English fishing fleets from Icelandic waters to the coasts of Labrador, and the influence of the roman Catholic Church on Norse Greenland.



The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500

Idealistic, misguided Morten Falck is a newly ordained priest sailing to Greenland in 1787 to convert the Inuit to the Danish church. A rugged outpost battered by unremittingly harsh winters, Sukkertoppen is simmering with the threat of dissent; natives from neighboring villages have unified to reject Danish rule and establish their own settlement atop Eternal Fjord. As Falck becomes involved with those in his care his ambitious catechist, a lonely trader s wife, and a fatalistic widow he comes to love his faith and reputation are compromised. The internationally acclaimed novelist Kim Leine charts the tragic events that connect these seemingly disparate lives, while illuminating the brutal and tender impulses of those seeking redemption and the shifting line between religion and mysticism. In the tradition of We, the Drowned, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is rich in earthy detail and Dickensian pathos, a visceral panorama of a fragile colony caught in the throes of history."

The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland--at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within this vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future. Greenland's ice doesn't just tell us where we've been. More urgently, it tells us where we're headed.

In "The Ice at the End of the World, " Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth's last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland's ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth century--first on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sleds--and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenland's seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling--one mile, two miles down. Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth's past, going back hundreds of thousands of years.

Today, scientists from all over the world are deploying every technological tool available to uncover the secrets of this frozen island before it's too late. As Greenland's ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas. It will also have drastic effects on ocean currents, weather systems, economies, and migration patterns.

Gertner chronicles the unfathomable hardships, amazing discoveries, and scientific achievements of the Arctic's explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent style--and a keen sense of what this work means for the rest of us. The melting ice sheet in Greenland is, in a way, an analog for time. It contains the past. It reflects the present. It can also tell us how much time we might have left.

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than ten years and has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely book, he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.

Why are the Danes so happy despite having the highest taxes? Do the Finns really have the best education system? Are the Icelanders as feral as they sometimes appear? How are the Norwegians spending their fantastic oil wealth? And why do all of them hate the Swedes? In "The Almost Nearly Perfect People", Booth explains who the Scandinavians are, how they differ and why, and what their quirks and foibles are, and he explores why these societies have become so successful and models for the world. Along the way, a more nuanced, often darker picture emerges of a region plagued by taboos, characterized by suffocating parochialism, and populated by extremists of various shades.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration—the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic—Andrea Barrett's compelling novel tells the story of a fateful expedition. Through the eyes of the ship's scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells, we encounter the "Narwhal"'s crew, its commander, and the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we meet the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery, finally discovering what they had not sought, the secrets of their own hearts.

The Voyage of the Narwhal

Reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity--a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival.

Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6-$7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity--a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

Nå, Niviaq Korneliussen 1990-imi Nuuk-mi inunngorpoq, maannalu siullermeertumik saqqummersitsinerani, atuakkiortoq isumalluarnartoq saqqummerluni. Taamaattumik kikkut tamat, kalaallit qallunaallu, arnaqatiminnik anguteqatiminnillu atoqateqarneq ajortut aamma arnaqatiminnik anguteqatiminnilluunniit atoqateqartartut, inuusuttut utoqqaallu, uanngaanniit aallartiinnarsinnaapput – HOMO sapienne-ip quppernerani siullermiit. 
Mette Moestrup oqaluttualiap siulequtaani 

Fia, Inuk, Arnaq, Ivinnguaq aamma Sara. Inuusuttut tallimat, Nuummi pissutsit allanngorneri, kinaassuseq asanninnerlu pillugit oqaluttuaat tallimat imminnut ataatsimoortillugit.

HOMO sapienne

Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly retold through the eyes and lives of the women who wielded power from behind the throne. A spellbinding novel, an extraordinary literary achievement, THE MISTS OF AVALON will stay with you for a long time to come....

The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all time classic. An airliner crashes in the polar ice-cap. In temperatures 40 degrees below zero, six men and four women survive. But for the members of a remote scientific research station who rescue them, there are some sinister questions to answer -- the first one being, who shot the pilot before the crash?

Night Without End

Experience the eco-thriller at a whole new level in this cli-fi spy novel. What is the real impact of global warming? This stylish thriller about climate change and its consequences couldn’t be more topical. Espionage, intrigue, and behind-the-scenes struggles for natural resources combine with French freelance spies and Bond-like action for a convincing, beautifully orchestrated tale, “like a sophisticated manga.”

The Arctic ice caps are breaking up. Europe and the East Coast of the Unites States brace for a tidal wave. Meanwhile, former French intelligence officer John Spencer Larivière, his karate-trained, steamy Eurasian partner, Victoire, and their bisexual computer-genius sidekick, Luc, pick up an ordinary freelance assignment that quickly leads them into the glacial silence of the great north, where a merciless war is being waged for control of discoveries that will change the future of humanity.

"Masterfully paced and wondrously prescient a cautionary tale ...Equal parts Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton, this is a terrific tale that charges out of the gate and speeds in relentless fashion to a wholly satisfying finish."--Jon Land, bestselling author of Strong Rain Falling

The Greenland Breach

This volume begins with a short introduction by Else Ostergard to the amazing finds of garments from the Norse settlement of Herjolfnes in Greenland. It then features chapters on technique - production of the thread, dyeing, weaving techniques, cutting and sewing - by Anna Norgard. Also included are measurements and drawings of garments, hoods, and stockings, with sewing instructions, by Lilli Fransen. A practical guide to making your own Norse garment

Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns

Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors – accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik – with a past that he’s unable to leave behind. When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theatre, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life. An avalanche and unremitting snowstorms close the mountain pass, and the 24-hour darkness threatens to push Ari over the edge, as curtains begin to twitch, and his investigation becomes increasingly complex, chilling and personal. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts, while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness – blinded by snow, and with a killer on the loose.

Snowblind (Dark Iceland #1)

How could a community of 2000-3000 Viking peasants survive in Arctic Greenland for 430 years (ca. 985-1415), and why did they finally disappear? European agriculture in an Arctic environment encountered serious ecological challenges. The Norse peasants faced these challenges by adapting agricultural practices they had learned from the Atlantic and North Sea coast of Norway.

Norse Greenland was the stepping stone for the Europeans who first discovered America and settled briefly in Newfoundland ca. AD 1000. The community had a global significance which surpassed its modest size.

In the last decades scholars have been nearly unanimous in emphasising that long-term climatic and environmental changes created a situation where Norse agriculture was no longer sustainable and the community was ruined. A secondary hypothesis has focused on ethnic confrontations between Norse peasants and Inuit hunters. In the last decades ethnic violence has been on the rise in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. In some cases it has degenerated into ethnic cleansing. This has strengthened the interest in ethnic violence in past societies. Challenging traditional hypotheses is a source of progress in all science. The present book does this on the basis of relevant written and archaeological material respecting the methodology of both sciences.

Norse Greenland: Viking Peasants in the Arctic

In "The Valkyries' Loom", Mich�le Hayeur Smith examines Viking textiles as evidence of the little-known work of women in the Norse colonies that expanded from Scandinavia across the North Atlantic in the ninth century AD. While previous researchers have overlooked textiles as insignificant artifacts, Hayeur Smith is the first to use them to understand gender and economy in Norse societies of the North Atlantic.

This groundbreaking study is based on the author's systematic comparative analysis of the vast textile collections in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands, materials that are largely unknown even to archaeologists and span 1,000 years. Through these garments and fragments, Hayeur Smith provides new insights into how the women of these island nations influenced international trade by producing cloth ("va�m�l"); how they shaped the development of national identities by creating clothing; and how they helped their communities survive climate change by reengineering clothes during the Little Ice Age. She supplements her analysis by revealing societal attitudes about weaving through the poem "Darra�arljo�" from "Nj�l's Saga", in which the Valkyries--��in's female warrior spirits--produce the cloth of history and decide the fates of men and nations.

Bringing Norse women and their labor to the forefront of research, Hayeur Smith establishes the foundation for a gendered archaeology of the North Atlantic that has never been attempted before. This monumental and innovative work contributes to global discussions about the hidden roles of women in past societies in preserving tradition and guiding change.

The Valkyries' Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic

One of the century's most spectacular archaeological finds occurred in 1921, a year before Howard Carter stumbled upon Tutankhamun's tomb, when Poul Norlund recovered dozens of garments from a graveyard in the Norse settlement of Herjolfsnaes, Greenland. Preserved intact for centuries by the permafrost, these mediaeval garments display remarkable similarities to western European costumes of the time. Previously, such costumes were known only from contemporary illustrations, and the Greenland finds provided the world with a close look at how ordinary Europeans dressed in the Middle Ages. Fortunately for Norlund's team, wood has always been extremely scarce in Greenland, and instead of caskets, many of the bodies were found swaddled in multiple layers of cast off clothing. When he wrote about the excavation later, Norlund also described how occasional thaws had permitted crowberry and dwarf willow to establish themselves in the top layers of soil. Their roots grew through coffins, clothing and corpses alike, binding them together in a vast network of thin fibers - as if, he wrote, the finds had been literally sewn in the earth. Eighty years of technical advances and subsequent excavations have greatly added to our understanding of the Herjolfsnaes discoveries. Woven into the Earth recounts the dramatic story of Norlund's excavation in the context of other Norse textile finds in Greenland. It then describes what the finds tell us about the materials and methods used in making the clothes. The weaving and sewing techniques detailed here are surprisingly sophisticated, and one can only admire the talent of the women who employed them, especially considering the harsh conditions they worked under. While Woven into the Earth will be invaluable to students of medieval archaeology, Norse society and textile history, both lay readers and scholars are sure to find the book's dig narratives and glimpses of life among the last Vikings fascinating.

Woven Into the Earth: Textiles from Norse Greenland

Flora Mackie was twelve when she first crossed the Arctic Circle on her father's whaling ship. Now she is returning to the frozen seas as the head of her own exploration expedition. Jakob de Beyn was raised in Manhattan, but his yearning for new horizons leads him to the Arctic as part of a rival expedition. When he and Flora meet, all thoughts of science and exploration give way before a sudden, all-consuming love.

The affair survives the growing tensions between the two groups, but then, after one more glorious summer on the Greenland coast, Jakob joins his leader on an extended trip into the interior, with devastating results.

The stark beauty of the Arctic ocean, where pack ice can crush a ship like an eggshell, and the empty sweep of the tundra, alternately a snow-muffled wasteland and an unexpectedly gentle meadow, are vividly evoked. Against this backdrop Penney weaves an irresistible love story, a compelling look at the dark side of the golden age of exploration, and a mystery that Flora, returning one last time to the North Pole as an old woman, will finally lay to rest.

Under A Pole Star

During World War II, in a secret Nazi submarine base, containers crafted entirely from looted wartime gold were hidden away. The treasure was not the solid gold chests, but the cargo they carried--an artifact so lethal that whoever possessed "Pandora's boxes" held the power to unleash hell upon the Earth... In the unforgiving wastes of Greenland, geologist Philip Mercer uncovers a long-abandoned U.S. Army base buried under the ice--and a long-dead body still hot with radiation. But before Mercer and his colleague, the seductive Dr. Anika Klein, can investigate further, a flash fire engulfs the base. Ordered to evacuate, their plane is forced to land when a bomb is discovered on board, and they must seek shelter from the murderous weather in a hidden ice cavern.

That's where they learn the startling truth. A powerful German corporation has launched an operation to destroy evidence of its Nazi past. But one of the corporate mercenaries knows what's inside the Pandora's boxes, and he plans to hold the entire world hostage--unless Mercer can find a way to stop him...

Pandora's Curse (Philip Mercer #4)

Trekking in Greenland - The Arctic Circle Trail: From Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut (Cicerone Trekking Guides)

"Everything -- my home, my eskimo culture -- all has been taken from me. Even my dead father's body could not be claimed for sacred burial." In 1907 the New York "World" carried a sensational full-page article. Next to an artist's sketch of a pleading boy, his arms outstretched toward the American Museum of Natural History, the headline blared, "Give Me My Father's Body."

Ten years earlier the renowned polar explorer Robert Peary had sailed into New York harbor with six Eskimos as his "cargo." He deposited them with museum scientists as "living specimens" and then abandoned them. Four Eskimos died within a year. One returned to Greenland. Only Minik, a boy of six or seven, remained.

During his twelve years in New York, Minik learned English, played sports, went to church, and acquired a taste for big-city life. But all that ended abruptly when he found his father's skeleton on display at the museum. Disillusioned with white society and desperate to return to his people, Minik finally sailed for Greenland in 1909. He succeeded in relearning his native language and the hunting skills he needed to survive, and even assisted a new generation of polar explorers, yet the rest of his life became a search to find a place where he truly belonged.

Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo

In the aftermath of a devastating plague, a fearless young heroine embarks on a dangerous and surprising journey to save her world in this brilliantly inventive thriller

In the ruins of a future America, fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star and her nomadic tribe live off the detritus of a crumbled civilization. Theirs is a world of children; before reaching the age of twenty, they all die of a strange disease they call Posies--a plague that has killed for generations. There is no medicine, no treatment; only the mysterious rumor of a cure.

When her brother begins showing signs of the disease, Ice Cream Star sets off on a bold journey to find this cure. Led by a stranger, a captured prisoner named Pasha who becomes her devoted protector and friend, Ice Cream Star plunges into the unknown, risking her freedom and ultimately her life. Traveling hundreds of miles across treacherous, unfamiliar territory, she will experience love, heartbreak, cruelty, terror, and betrayal, fighting to protect the only world she has ever known.

A postapocalyptic literary epic as imaginative as "The Passage" and as linguistically ambitious as "Cloud Atlas", "The Country of Ice Cream Star" is a breathtaking work from a writer of rare and unconventional talent.

The Country of Ice Cream Star

Novelist Sarah Moss had a childhood dream of moving to Iceland, sustained by a wild summer there when she was nineteen. In 2009, she saw an advertisement for a job at the University of Iceland and applied on a whim, despite having two young children and a comfortable life in an English cathedral city. The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland's economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary, by the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull and by a collection of new friends, including a poet who saw the only bombs fall on Iceland in 1943, a woman who speaks to elves and a chef who guided Sarah's family around the intricacies of Icelandic cuisine.

Sarah was drawn to the strangeness of Icelandic landscape, and explored hillsides of boiling mud, volcanic craters and fissures, and the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She walked the coast path every night after her children were in bed, watching the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds. As the weeks and months went by, the children settled in local schools and Sarah got to know her students and colleagues, she and her family learned new ways to live.

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

Philip Short observed Pol Pot at close quarters during the one and only official visit Pol ever made abroad, to China in 1975. He was struck by Pol Pot's charm and charisma, yet, soon after, the leader would emerge as the architect of one of the most radical and ruthless experiments in social engineering ever undertaken. His egalitarian utopia released a reign of terror that would result in one in every five Cambodians - more than a million people - perishing in the killing fields of from hunger.

Why did it happen? How did an idealistic dream of justice and prosperity mutate into one of humanity's worst nightmares? To answer these questions, Short traveled through Cambodia, interviewing former Khmer Rouge leaders and sifting through previously closed archives around the world. Key figures, including Khlen Samphan and Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's brother-in-law and foreign minister, speak here for the first time.

Philip Short's masterly narrative reveals how Pol Pot engineered his country's desolation, fashining the definitive portrait of the man who headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern times.

(back cover)

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

Her eyes are wide open. Her lips parted as if to speak. Her dead body frozen in the ice…She is not the only one. 

When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. 

The victim, a beautiful young socialite, appeared to have the perfect life. Yet when Erika begins to dig deeper, she starts to connect the dots between the murder and the killings of three prostitutes, all found strangled, hands bound and dumped in water around London. 

What dark secrets is the girl in the ice hiding? 

As Erika inches closer to uncovering the truth, the killer is closing in on Erika. 

The last investigation Erika led went badly wrong… resulting in the death of her husband. With her career hanging by a thread, Erika must now battle her own personal demons as well as a killer more deadly than any she’s faced before. But will she get to him before he strikes again?

The Girl in the Ice (Detective Erika Foster, #1)

From the author of "A Venetian Affair "and "Lucia "comes a charming odyssey in the path of the mysterious Zen brothers, who explored parts of the New World a century before Columbus, and became both a source of scandal and a cause célèbre among geographers in the following centuries. 

This delightful journey begins with Andrea di Robilant’s serendipitous discovery of a travel narrative published in Venice in 1558 by the Renaissance statesman Nicolò Zen: the text and its fascinating nautical map re-created the travels of two of the author’s ancestors, brothers who explored the North Atlantic in the 1380s and 1390s. Di Robilant set out to discover why later, in the nineteenth century, the Zens’ account came under attack as one of the greatest frauds in geographical history. Was their map—and even their journey—partially or perhaps entirely faked? 

In "Irresistible North" the author follows the Zens’ route from the Faeroes to Shetland to Iceland and Greenland, greeted by characters who help unravel the enigmas in the Zens’ account. The medieval world comes to life as di Robilant guides us through a landscape enlivened by the ghosts of power-hungry earls and bishops of the old Norwegian realm and magical tales of hot springs and smoking mountains. In this rich telling—an original work of history and a travel book in one—the magnetism of the north draws us in as powerfully as it drew the Zen brothers more than six centuries ago.

Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers

In 1910, Freuchen and his close friend, the famed arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen, founded a settlement and trading post among the Greenland Inuit at Thule, only 800 miles from the North Pole. Freuchen lived there for fifteen years, adopting native ways of life, and married an Inuit woman and had two children. He went on many expeditions, surviving frostbite, snowblindness, and starvation. In Arctic Adventure he writes of polar bear hunts, of meeting people who had resorted to cannibalism in times of famine, and of the moving experience of seeing the sun after three months of winter darkness. He writes about the Inuit with great respect and affection, describing their stoicism amidst hardship, their spiritual beliefs, their ingenious ways of surviving their harsh environment, their humor in the face of danger, and the social politics behind such customs as "wife-trading." Freuchen's warmth, wit, and tremendous literary ability make this book stand out from so many explorers' tales; it is a rich human saga.

Greenland

An African in Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

Gretel Ehrlich

The Sea Road

Margaret Elphinstone

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Peter Høeg

A Certain Slant of Light (Light, #1)

Laura Whitcomb

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

Mitchell Zuckoff

The Six Sacred Stones (Jack West Jr, #2)

Matthew Reilly

The Greenlanders

Jane Smiley

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

Cold Earth (Shetland Island, #7)

Ann Cleeves

No One Thinks of Greenland

John Griesemer

The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change

Philip Conkling

The Girl Without Skin (Grønland - Greenland #1)

Mads Peder Nordbo

The Thrall's Tale

Judith Lindbergh

The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days

Alda Sigmundsdóttir

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

Nancy Marie Brown

Smiler's Bones

Peter Lerangis

The First Crossing Of Greenland

Fridtjof Nansen

The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500

Kirsten A. Seaver

The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

Kim Leine

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

Jon Gertner

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

Michael Booth

The Voyage of the Narwhal

Andrea Barrett

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

Barbara Ehrenreich

HOMO sapienne

Niviaq Korneliussen

The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Night Without End

Alistair MacLean

The Greenland Breach

Bernard Besson

Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns

Lilli Fransen

Snowblind (Dark Iceland #1)

Ragnar Jónasson

Norse Greenland: Viking Peasants in the Arctic

Arnved Nedkvitne

The Valkyries' Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic

Michèle Hayeur Smith

Woven Into the Earth: Textiles from Norse Greenland

Else Østergård

Under A Pole Star

Stef Penney

Pandora's Curse (Philip Mercer #4)

Jack Du Brul

Trekking in Greenland - The Arctic Circle Trail: From Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut (Cicerone Trekking Guides)

Paddy Dillon

Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo

Kenn Harper

The Country of Ice Cream Star

Sandra Newman

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

Sarah Moss

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare