True North: Travels in Arctic Europe

Driven by a yearning to experience the vast skies and frozen beauty of the North, Gavin Francis goes in search of the people living along the northern limits of Europe. From the first Greek explorers to the Vikings to modern polar adventurers, he travels through history and legend to find out why - and how - we are drawn to the North.

Francis's encounters in the Arctic teach him as much about that sense of longing for the North, and of belonging to the North as the seafarers, warriors, monks and poets whose stories he follows. In Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and Lapland, Francis finds a way of life characterised by both peace and unease, threatened as it is by the shadow of climate change and the tense, ever-increasing importance of Arctic Europe in global power politics.

'Fluent, subtle, tough and often beautiful, True North stands alongside Peter Davidson's The Idea of North and Joanna Kavenna's The Ice Museum, as a significant recent addition to the Arctic canon' - ROBERT MACFARLANE

'The book is threaded with moments of infectious joy . . . where the past and the land and the writer elide, travel writing properly endures' - COLIN THUBRON

'A deep empathy with the land and its history runs like a golden thread through every chapter' - SARA WHEELER

'Thank goodness for people like Gavin Francis who are prepared not only to visit our northerly neighbours, but write about them in a way that shows how much of their history is our history too' - ROGER COX

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Gavin Francis is an award-winning writer and GP. He is the author of ten non-fiction books, including Island Dreams, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2020; Adventures in Human Being, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award; Empire Antarctica, which won Scottish Book of the Year in the SMIT Awards and was shortlisted for both the Ondaatje and Costa Prizes; and Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, which was a Sunday Times bestseller. He has written for the Guardian, The Times, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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