Antarctic navigation

Antarctic Navigation is a novel about an expedition to the South Pole led by Morgan Lamont, a young and passionate American woman. The setting is the vast white landscape of Antarctica, known simply as the Ice. Morgan's journey is inspired, and haunted, by the doomed expedition of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott eighty years earlier.

For Morgan, Scott's life, his dream, his death and the whole idea of navigating Antarctica stand for the search for integrity in a morally uncertain age. Her mother's frightening, quixotic sacrifice and the generosity of a grandfather she had long been estranged from free her to pursue her goal, which is to vindicate Scott by recreating his polar journey.

The book follows Morgan from her earlier life as a daughter, a lover and an independent-minded maverick, and explores what in her own life and in America led her to this undertaking. It then shows her assembling a talented and unlikely team of explorers and leading them across the ice to the Pole through storms and physical and emotional crises.

The return trip takes the group back toward their base, built near the hut from which Scott's party set out. They must cross the harsh terrain again before the austral winter arrives, and Morgan's physical, intellectual and emotional certainties are tested to the limit. The novel presents her journey as a figure for the dangerous passage everyone faces as the millennium approaches, set against the stark ice of the last great wilderness on earth.