Under A Pole Star

Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards Novel Award From the author of the Costa Book Award winning The Tenderness of Wolves. It is 1948. The woman dubbed as the ‘Snow Queen’ – in reality elderly explorer Flora Mackie - is en route to the Arctic Circle, seemingly involved in an elaborate publicity stunt. This is, however, more than an exploration into the Arctoc Interior: this is an exploration into the mysteries of her own past. In Under a Pole Star, Stef Penny deploys her magestrial command of language and place to chart a life lived absolutely on the edge. At the novel’s heart is Flora’s all-consuming love for explorer and rival Jakob de Beyn, a man who will ultimately reap the terrible consequence of his own ambition. Passionately evoking the golden age of exploration and the longing of two people destined to be both together and driven apart, Under  a Pole Star captures the essence of yearning, discovery and terrible fate."It is a tribute to Penney’s superlative descriptive skills that the book’s erotic charge is so startlingly effective, and that her icy landscapes cast such a lasting, almost hallucinatory spell." - The Guardian