“What I liked about her book is just how down to earth it was and the priorities she has. Her reasons for adventure were quite different to a lot of stuff I’ve read. For example, she has recipes in the book. She makes a real effort to collect bits of seaweed and wild garlic along the way. It’s also quite inspiring that she began as a late middle-aged woman to do these sorts of things.” Read more...
Alastair Humphreys, Travel Writer
“A wonderful work of literary travel writing charting the author’s journey through some of Alaska’s most ruggedly beautiful landscapes, mirroring the upstream migration of the salmon from the ocean to their spawning grounds.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Highlights From a Year in Reading
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Polar City Red was the first novel ever to published and promoted explicitly as cli-fi novel….Polar City Red is about a family of Americans who are forced to leave their home in Minnesota and make their way north to a pioneering polar city in northern Alaska, threatened daily by looters, marauders and survivalists living around the fortified perimeters of Polar City Red.” Read more...
Dan Bloom, Environmentalist
“In my opinion Coming into the Country, about Alaska, is his best book. It describes the natural history and scenery in incredible detail, but he’s also writing about a very unusual part of America, and how it was becoming what it is now. He was there at an interesting moment in the seventies, when they were trying to find a new capital for the state. There were a lot of decisions to be made about resource management, and he illuminates those issues as well as describing how communities and individuals function in this incredibly rugged place. It’s a wonderful book.” Read more...
Peter Hessler, Journalist
