Eighty degrees north, by Elizabeth Kay
Svalbard I read a lot of books about the Arctic before I managed to go there. I would like to recommend Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver. Also Michael Palin’s Erebus , and An African in Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. These are both more or less factual, and there is of course a whole host of of Children’s fiction featuring snow and ice from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights . It may well have been Narnia that first attracted me to the snowy landscapes that were all too uncommon in my childhood, and even more so today with global warming. Although I have been north four times, I have only seen the Northern Lights once, and then faintly for fifteen minutes in Norway. Iceland and Greenland both failed to deliver anything except heavy cloud cover. However, my trip in June was during was during 24 hour daylight, and the object of the exercise was to see a polar bear in its natural environment. The Arctic is expensive. I went ...