Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North Hardcover – 9 Nov 2017

Review ------ "Icebreaker sails with a phlegmatic Finnish crew into threatening and threatened polar waters... Clare’s 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" (Philip Hoare 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 site 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 Clare’s 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" (Sara Wheeler Spectator) "A voyage into the Arctic on an icebreaking ship with one of Britain's best writers of nature and place. You feel the cold leaping off the pages" (Big Issue (Books of the Year)) "Clare's prose is so brilliantly evocative and so rich with awe, this book could sit as comfortably next to Grimm's fairytales as it does in the travel section... With an elegiac Keatsian sensibility, he depicts "the making and melting of ice" so seductively that reaching the end of this wonderful book feels like stumbling out of a Finnish sauna into a cold shower" (Jane Graham Big Issue) "Offers some telling and often amusing ins into the Finnish way of life while at the same time explaining how the work of an icebreaker crew fits into the increasingly complex geopolitical picture in the far north… he writes with perceptiveness and precision about the ways in which global warming are already starting to change the geography of the region... powerfully evocative" (Roger Cox Scotsman) "A hilarious, off-beat travelogue in the tradition of Eric Newby and Redmond O’Hanlon. Warm and witty, Clare catches an important moment in the unfolding of climate change, and shows why we should all pay attention to what's happening in the ice" (Gavin Francis) "Captivating… Clare himself is a charming companion for the reader. His narrative encompasses both the past and a highly charged now – Finnish history interwoven with instantaneous thrills as the ship grinds and slides through a world that most of us will never experience... a delightful mix of mariner-rime reportage, local colour and Finnish history" (Roy Wilkinson Caught By The River) About the Author ---------------- Horatio Clare is the bestselling author of the memoirs Running for the Hills and Truant and the travel books A Single Swallow (which follows the birds' migration from South Africa to the UK), Down to the Sea in Ships (the story of two voyages on container vessels) and Orison for a Curlew, a journey in search of one of the world’s rarest birds. 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.

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