Ice Diaries

“Ice Diaries is stunningly written and should be on the shelf of anyone fascinated by the globe’s final geographic and psychic frontier.”— New York Times
“It’s a discussion of the Antarctic as a physical landscape — its impact on the imagination — and an exploration of one person’s inner world.” — Chicago Tribune
“Ice Diaries artfully conveys both the magical allure and the deadly hauteur of this icy world that few of us will ever see.” — Toronto Star
“McNeil’s first-person narrative of her experience wholly absorbs… Most of Ice Diaries, however, reads like a novel. It’s a paradox: the best novels emulate real life and the best true stories emulate fiction.” — Maclean’s
“McNeil’s gripping book, a memoir of her stint as ‘the writer’ during an Antarctic summer, is a vivid depiction of the human community in the ‘granite quarry-crossed-with-a-penal-colony’ of a polar base camp. This sci-fi landscape is suffused with menace and foreboding but so, McNeil remembers, is home.” — The Guardian Best Books of 2018
“[McNeil’s] new book is a welcome literary-minded addition to a category of books dominated by male explorers.” — Metro
“The first and undoubtably most successful part is the descriptive writing about the landscape of Antarctica and the conditions of life on a base there… It is this type of descriptive writing which is the real strength of the book. It’s interesting to learn the details of a scientific expedition under extreme conditions, of course, but it is the Antarctic we want to visualize, and we can, though McNeil’s remarkable writing.” — The Fiddlehead
“A uniquely personal and honest response to an extreme environment few of us will ever experience.” — The Herald
“She writes about the loneliness, the fear, the utter darkness, and the rare an d incredible beauty of places few of us will ever visit. Highly recommended.” — For the Love of Books
“The reason I picked this book up was because I love that combination of geography, history and science but from a writer’s perspective… All in all this was a varied and enjoyable read.” — Books Are a Uniquely Portable Magic

Jean McNeil is the author of ten books including four novels and a collection of short fiction. Her work has been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Journey Prize, and she has won the Prism International prize for short fiction and subsequently for narrative non-fiction. She is the co-director of the Masters in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia and lives in London, England.

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