'A great, shivery, seductive read.' Elle Intelligent, accessible literary fiction of the highest order. Superbly dramatic and beautifully readable. A terrific tale of high endeavour and polar peril, this is the story of a scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1855 and the women the explorers left behind. A brilliant portrait of Victorian society obsessed with mapping and classifying everything under the sun -- including the icy Arctic -- where the emancipation of women and the evolution of species are the next great revolutions just stirring into life.