Icebreaker

Icebreaker sails with a phlegmatic Finnish crew into threatening and threatened polar waters... Clares witty prose, filled with vivid descriptions, bears witness to the melting skin of our fragile planet and all that its loss might mean for our souls * New Statesman Books of the Year * Clare has a gift for pinning to the page all that comes his way. His is a joy in framing with such precision and flair that it is the opposite of indulgent, allowing the reader to share in his own marvellous encounters... nimble, vital, unexpectedly affecting -- Stephanie Cross * Observer * Icebreaker has many of the pleasures of classic travel writing: a pure sense of visiting another world in the company of an eloquent guide. But this is not a backward-looking book, and its warning for the future is clear The Met Office estimates the Arctic could be seasonally ice-free by the 2040s. It may not be many decades, then, until Clares travelogue is a record of a vanished world -- Erica Wagner * Financial Times * Light fills his writing... Mr Clare is a great enjoyer -- of people, landscape, and above all of language * Economist * Salted with excellent topographical language... Clare has an ear and an eye for words... one can't have enough of the big white * Spectator *

Horatio Clare is the bestselling author of numerous books including the memoirs Running for the Hills and Truant and the travel books A Single Swallow, Down to the Sea in Ships, Orison for a Curlew, Icebreaker and The Light in the Dark. His books for children include Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot and Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds. Horatio's essays and reviews appear on BBC radio and in the Financial Times, the Observer and the Spectator, among other publications. He lives with his family in West Yorkshire.