The Library of Ice

A vivid and perceptive book combining memoir, scientific and cultural history with a bewitching account of landscape and place.

Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019

Long captivated by the solid yet impermanent nature of ice, by its stark, rugged beauty, Nancy Campbell sets out from the world’s northernmost museum – at Upernavik in Greenland – to explore it in all its facets. From the Bodleian Library archives to the traces left by the great polar expeditions, from remote Arctic settlements to the ice houses of Calcutta, she examines the impact of ice on our lives at a time when it is itself under threat from climate change.

The Library of Ice is a fascinating and beautifully rendered evocation of the interplay of people and their environment on a fragile planet, and of a writer’s quest to define the value of her work in a disappearing landscape.

‘A wonderful book: Nancy Campbell is a fine storyteller with a rare physical intelligence. The extraordinary brilliance of her eye confers the reader a total immersion in the rimy realms she explores. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow – I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth’—Dan Richards, author of Climbing Days

‘As a printmaker accustomed to working in moveable type, Campbell weighs her words carefully, and her descriptions are steeped in fine observation of artistic objects and material culture… a refreshing lack of romanticism… a dreamlike book.’—Gavin Francis in The Guardian

‘An intellectual omnivore, Campbell examines ice cores as archives in which researchers “read the alphabet of elements and isotopes”; and probes the weird dynamics of hail, proto-chemist Robert Boyle’s 1665 New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, curling rinks and the exploits of polar explorers from Knud Rasmussen to George Murray Levick. A marvellously subtle journey by way of flake, frost and berg.’—Barbara Kiser in Nature

‘It is a sparkling and wonderful meditation on a substance we must cherish.’ 
—The Independent

’A subtle, rich, dense, marvellous compendium, that takes in much of what ice has affected, melded to or covered in its frosted rime… a slow act of devotion, a modern-day medicine.’—Geographic

‘It is a pleasant brew infused with elements not only of travel and history, but also of memoir and personal reflection’—Sara Wheeler in Literary Review