The Land That Never Melts

A thrillingly shocking yet beautiful novel about love and deception, nature and climate change, throws the reader on the ice of a glacier that threatens to disappear from underneath.

Unni is a Finnish glacier researcher who studies on Baffin Island at which speed the Penny Glacier melts. She listens to the ripple of water from inside the ice and drops rubber ducks into its cracks, to follow their path to the sea. But Unni is also looking for Jon, a mystical man she had met on the glacier a year earlier and fell in love with.

Canada 1970. A young woman walks in the tundra with a child in her womb, listens to the rumble of a glacier and fears the worst. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, another woman walks through the stairs of the adoption office and hopes for the best.

The Land that Never Melts is a story of belonging, homesickness, freedom and love of northern nature. On the surface floats the threat of the melting glacier, whereas gruesome secrets from the past of a people bubble underneath.

A thrillingly shocking yet beautiful novel about love and deception, nature and climate change, throws the reader on the ice of a glacier that threatens to disappear from underneath.

Unni is a Finnish glacier researcher who studies on Baffin Island at which speed the Penny Glacier melts. She listens to the ripple of water from inside the ice and drops rubber ducks into its cracks, to follow their path to the sea. But Unni is also looking for Jon, a mystical man she had met on the glacier a year earlier and fell in love with.

Canada 1970. A young woman walks in the tundra with a child in her womb, listens to the rumble of a glacier and fears the worst. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, another woman walks through the stairs of the adoption office and hopes for the best.

The Land that Never Melts is a story of belonging, homesickness, freedom and love of northern nature. On the surface floats the threat of the melting glacier, whereas gruesome secrets from the past of a people bubble underneath.

info

  • Year of publication

    2021

  • Original title

    Maa joka ei koskaan sula

  • Page count

    312

  • Original publisher

    Otava Publishing Company

  • Original language of publication

    Finnish

  • Rights sold

    Germany

Reviews

  • Helmi Nöjd - Toisinkoinen

    "The comfort of Markkula's work is in the quick pictures of mountain peaks. Then, inevitably, a piece of glacier falls into the sea and the anxiety persists, moving between the covers of the book, into the living room and the townhouse begins to feel like a hollow chamber. All of this despite the fact that the climate crisis is not the most immediate theme of the work. The Arctic regions themselves are so loaded with meaning that perhaps no work located there can ignore the topic of the climate issue. The reading of this beautiful description of nature is associated with fear and knowledge of the loss of diversity. I devoured the book so fast so that they would not disappear completely"

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