Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Top ten Arctic novels

Ian McGuire's new novel is The North Water. One of the author's ten top Arctic novels, as shared at the Guardian:
Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean

An old-school 60s thriller set aboard a US nuclear submarine travelling below the Arctic ice pack. No women, no sex, very little explicit violence, but lots of details about submarine engineering, and plenty of strong, laconic men in situations of extreme peril. MacLean’s sentences are sometimes clunky and his characters (even the Americans) talk and think like Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots. But the plot is a juggernaut, and what other novel shows us the Arctic from underneath?
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue