In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to “read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content”, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling t...
We are in Tromso. Fishing trawlers and polar ships lie in the harbour, quiet and modest. They smell of tar and fishoil, and they are encompassed by an atmosphere of adventure, of ice and storm and distance