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A review by ridgewaygirl
Cold Earth by Sarah Moss
4.0
We tried to talk about survival but we didn't get very far. I think postgraduate students may be an evolutionary dead end, though you'd think archaeologists would have more of a clue than mathematical logicians, say, or experts in late Latin poetry. Nina, who works on nineteenth-century travel writing, knows all about expeditions that didn't make it, but so far her suggestions are limited to wondering how the Franklin survivors cooked their colleagues, since the chopped up bones were found in cooking pots, and suggesting that there ought to be some way of catching fish using tights.
A small archaeological dig on the west coast of Greenland sets out to uncover what they can of a medival Norse farmstead during the brief weeks of summer. Back home, there are worrying indications that an epidemic might prove more dangerous than SARS or swine flu. Nina, the only non-archaeologist, soon begins to hear alarming noises at night and to suffer from vivid nightmares of what happened to the inhabitants of this small settlement. Tension grows as they lose both their internet and satellite phone connections to the outside world. With winter coming, the group begins to worry about whether they'll be picked up on schedule and whether there'll be a world to return to.
Cold Earth was one of those books that felt painful to put down. Sarah Moss builds such exquisitely suspenseful tension as the group bickers, comes apart, and wonders if the world outside still exists, that up through the final pages, I was prepared for pretty much anything to happen. With its near-Arctic setting, I can't think of a better book for these hot summer days, unless you want to be able to put the book down now and then.
A small archaeological dig on the west coast of Greenland sets out to uncover what they can of a medival Norse farmstead during the brief weeks of summer. Back home, there are worrying indications that an epidemic might prove more dangerous than SARS or swine flu. Nina, the only non-archaeologist, soon begins to hear alarming noises at night and to suffer from vivid nightmares of what happened to the inhabitants of this small settlement. Tension grows as they lose both their internet and satellite phone connections to the outside world. With winter coming, the group begins to worry about whether they'll be picked up on schedule and whether there'll be a world to return to.
Cold Earth was one of those books that felt painful to put down. Sarah Moss builds such exquisitely suspenseful tension as the group bickers, comes apart, and wonders if the world outside still exists, that up through the final pages, I was prepared for pretty much anything to happen. With its near-Arctic setting, I can't think of a better book for these hot summer days, unless you want to be able to put the book down now and then.