The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

Christoph Ransmayr's acclaimed first novel.

This multi-layered adventure novel centres on the fate of an Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition between 1872 and 1874. In the Arctic summer of 1872, the "Payer-Weyprecht Expedition" sets off for the unexplored sea north-east of the Siberian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The expedition ship is soon - and forever - trapped by pack ice. After more than a year of drifting through all the horrors of ice and darkness, the scurvy-stricken crew discovers a group of islands buried under glaciers at the edge of the world and christens it "Emperor Franz Joseph Land" in honour of a distant ruler. One of the last blind spots is thus erased from the map of the Old World.

Parallel to the drama of this historical expedition, Ransmayr tells the story of a young Italian living in Vienna named Mazzini, who more than a hundred years later becomes an obsessive collector of all the evidence and documents left behind by the "Payer-Weyprecht Expedition" and finally sets off into the Arctic Ocean to retrace the discovery of "Franz-Joseph Land" as a passenger on a Norwegian research vessel. But in the course of his research into the history of polar exploration, Mazzini gets deeper and deeper into the Arctic present and finally disappears, a sledge traveller, in the glacial landscapes of Spitsbergen.

“One of the German language’s most gifted young novelists.”—Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness