Empire Antarctica

A book full of wonder * * Sunday Times * * A valuable addition to polar literature, vividly describing the brutal, but beautiful, realities of undergoing an Antarctic winter -- SIR RANULPH FIENNES Moving, mesmerizing, and wonderful * * The Economist * * Empire Antarctica is the embodiment of everything I admire in travel writing - a great journey, intense isolation, wide reading, vivid writing, scientific research, and something in the nature of an old-fashioned ordeal. That Gavin Francis is a medical doctor, with an important role to play in the darkness and cold at the ends of the earth, is a bonus. I loved this book -- PAUL THEROUX This is the sort of book that gives obsession a very good name. Here, in a cold, silent place you realise that obsession is another name for love. And love leads to extraordinary and beautiful writing . . . this is a wonderful book -- SARA MAITLAND A beautiful, profound and highly readable account of a remarkable personal adventure. Francis's pacing is deft, his prose vivid, his research worn lightly. This is probably as close as most of us will ever get to experiencing a modern polar winter. Empire Antarctica is surely destined to become a standard, not so much of travel as of staying very still * * Daily Telegraph * * An intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons . . . shines with a clarity and lyricism descended from Thoreau * * Times Literary Supplement * * A beautiful hymn to limitless solitude . . . His bracing year spent among emperor penguins presents an ordeal that is also a joy. And it's beautifully written on every page -- TOM ADAIR Francis' best writing (and it is excellent) . . . is Robert Macfarlane on ice. This writing achieves the 'quilted quality' of silence, and through it we are brought to a new landscape of words * * Literary Review * * A finely written account of an extreme experience of the Antarctic, worthy to stand beside some of the great travel narratives in the English language * * RSL Ondaatje Prize Judges * *