Genre Guide: Polar Fiction

Twenty-year-old Constance Horton has run away from her life in Victorian London, disguising herself as a boy to board the Makepeace, an expedition vessel bound for the icy and unexplored Northwest Passage. When she fails to return from the voyage, it’s up to her sister Maude, back home in London, to uncover her fate.

A richly atmospheric saga that charts the repercussions of a scandalous 19th century love affair between a young Sámi reindeer herder in the Arctic Circle and the daughter of the renegade Lutheran minister whose teachings are upending the Sámi way of life.

Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica.

Endlessly cold, with diminishing rations, the men of the HMS Terror fight to survive with poisonous food, a dwindling supply of coal, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is far more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror constantly clawing to get in.

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a feat of mechanical and social engineering complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living but the city is starting to fray along the edges – crime and corruption have set in and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the council and community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south.

One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls – sisters, eight and eleven – go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.

The Spahrs family, descendants of Arctic homesteaders, make ends meet by raising octopuses and transporting tourists by seaplane. But siblings Finley and Milda find a new way to make money – treasure hunting for the valuable antique pianos brought north (and immediately lost) by their ancestors.

“Taaqtumi” is an Inuktitut word that means “in the dark” – and these spine-tingling horror stories by Northern writers show just how dangerous darkness can be.

Half Inuit and half outsider, Edie Kiglatuk is the best guide in her corner of the Arctic. But as a woman, she gets only grudging respect from the elders who ruled her isolated community on Ellesmere Island. When a man is shot and killed while out on an “authentic” Arctic adventure under her watch, she is drawn into the investigation.

Aboard the expeditionary ship of his hero, the world-famous explorer James “Australis” Randall, Jonathan Morgan may live as his true self – and true gender – and have the adventures he has always been denied. But not all is smooth sailing: the First World War casts its long shadow over them all, and grief, guilt, and mistrust skulk among the explorers.