Cold Coast

Loosely drawn from the life of Svalbard's first woman trapper, this novel follows Wanny Woldstad, a widow who reaches the Arctic archipelago in 1932 and enters a line of work where Norwegian men have long kept women out. Her trapping partner, Anders Sæterdal, makes little attempt to hide his low opinion of her, and Wanny is determined to show him that a woman can do the job.

The story unfolds over a full Svalbard winter, when the sun disappears for four months. Wanny and Sæterdal face polar bears, crossings of glaciers, howling blizzards and the hazards of sea ice, and they travel for miles on foot to set traps for Arctic fox. Wanny also keeps secrets of her own, and the long polar darkness shelters them, though hiding them takes a toll as she pursues a dream that a woman of the 1930s was not expected to chase.

Running alongside the trappers' story is that of a young blue Arctic fox. It is a hunter too, and it must find food and learn to move through the trappers' territory if it is to survive its first winter in the Arctic.