South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

Overview

A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

Hudson Booksellers Book of the Year

One of the New York Post’s Best Books of the Summer

One of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

IndieNext Pick

A Time Magazine “What to Read Now” Selection

A wry novel set at the edge of the earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart

Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and on the verge of ruining her career. So when the opportunity arises to join the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance—and finds herself in the company of others who are just abnormal enough for Polar life, a group of eccentrics motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. When they are joined by a fringe scientist who claims climate change is a hoax, the Polies’ already-imbalanced community is rattled, bringing them to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452972206
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ashley Shelby is a novelist, short story writer, and former environmental journalist. She is author of Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, and Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. She lives in the Twin Cities.

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2017
Shelby’s debut novel is a (literally) chilling story of Antarctic survival at South Pole Station, where scientists, artists, and support personnel live, work, argue, and pout inside a geodesic dome in temps of 35 degrees below zero. Cooper Gosling, an unsuccessful artist, “your typical aimless thirty-year-old looking to delay the inevitable slide into mediocrity,” is accepted for a one-year assignment to South Pole Station as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She truly is adrift in her career and personal life, but finds comfort and inclusion at South Pole Station, where personality disorders and a fondness for alcohol are seemingly requirements. The station’s isolation, close-quarters living, and bitter cold do not inspire her; more interesting for Cooper are the people and relationships she observes—the social tribes and ego posturing, especially when a hated scientist arrives. Dr. Frank Pavano is a climate change denier, and his presence riles the other scientists. When Cooper helps Pavano with an unauthorized experiment and is maimed in an accident, a blame-game investigation, a global warming scandal, and congressional outrage and meddling with funding threaten the station’s future. Cooper and her polar pals stage a mutiny, resulting in a tense, ice-cold showdown with the feds, the media, a greedy defense contractor, and an insidious energy company. This is a fascinating novel, loaded with interesting history of Antarctic exploration, current scientific operations, and the living and working conditions of those folks brave enough to endure six months of darkness and six months of daylight. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A ramblingly entertaining first novel."—The New York Times Book Review

"South Pole Station crackles with energy."—The Washington Post

"A lovely, satirical, and emotionally complex novel."—LitHub

"With South Pole Station’s satire, science, wry wit, and warmth, Ashley Shelby has written one of the best novels of the year."—Shelf Awareness

"This is a fascinating novel, loaded with interesting history of Antarctic exploration, current scientific operations, and the living and working conditions of those folks brave enough to endure six months of darkness and six months of daylight."—Publishers Weekly

"Shelby’s first novel eschews easy choices and treats interpersonal relations, grief, science, art, and political controversy with the same deft, humorous hand. Readers will find characters to love, suspect, and identify with among Cooper’s fellow Polies and won’t forget them easily."—Booklist

"Shelby’s writing is pithy and funny . . . In this unusual, entertaining first novel, Ashley Shelby combines science with literature to make a clever case for scientists’ and artists’ shared conviction that ‘the world could become known if only you looked hard enough.’"—NPR

From the Publisher

★ 04/15/2017
Struggling with a family tragedy and its aftermath, painter Cooper Gosling receives a science and writing grant to work at the South Pole Station. By going to the "ends of the earth," she hopes to accept her loss and adjust her thinking. The sharp learning curve includes harsh weather conditions, the hierarchy of the station's social structure, and the political implications of competing scientific theories. Cooper struggles to find a new way to express herself as she gradually becomes an accepted member of the inner circle. Then she's injured in a freak accident, an event that snowballs into a major international incident. In the aftermath, she builds a new perspective and approach to life and art. Shelby's first novel, based on a short story that won the Third Coast Fiction Prize, skillfully weaves science, climate change, politics, sociology, and art. Competing ideas about the origins of the universe are wrapped in the vagaries of human nature and the dangers of climate extremes. Her characters are a quirky subset of humanity. VERDICT All readers of fiction, particularly those interested in life in extreme climates, will find this appealing. [See Prepub Alert, 2/17/17.]—Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

Library Journal

Finding herself adrift following her twin brother's suicide, painter Cooper Gosling decides to accept a year-long fellowship to an artists and writers program in Antarctica. Narrator Rebecca Gibel provides an irreverent tone for Cooper and the motley cast of characters whose motivations for going to the South Pole range from studying climate change to creating art to escaping reality back home. Gibel’s voicing adequately captures the eccentric group, who frequently lapse into exasperated arguing with one another, especially when holding forth on their scientific beliefs, which Gibel narrates with clarity. She also provides accents for non-native English-speaking characters, which aid in differentiating the many idiosyncratic personalities. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

2017-06-06
In the messy human petri dish at the South Pole, a comic novel brews.Shelby begins her smart and inventive first novel with 11 italicized questions plucked from a psychiatric evaluation: "Are you often sad? Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority?..."Any American headed to Antarctica in 2003 via the National Science Foundation must answer them. It's a nifty way to unpack character and signal why her heroine, Cooper Gosling, has passed only provisionally. Cooper is 30, a drinker and a fine arts painter from the upper Midwest, a smartass who holds that "hotdish had never received its gastronomic due and the fake Minnesota accents in Fargo were the blackface of regional phonology." Fetching and witty, Cooper becomes the station chief's favorite and irresistible to a tall and handsome astrophysicist. Their attraction—one of the novel's key pleasures—is telegraphed within the first few pages. Readers also learn early that Cooper is fleeing the sorrow of her twin's recent suicide; she carries a pinch of his ashes in a travel-size Tylenol bottle. Thus, Shelby balances Eros with Thanatos in a story composed of barbed dialogue, email, and official memos. A climate-change skeptic arrives to bedevil the polar community, hatching a far-fetched political conspiracy. Clearly, the writer likes agita—politics mixed with science fuels Red River Rising (2004), her nonfiction book about the catastrophic 1997 flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She writes well about science and the peculiar, pressurized human ecosystem at the bottom of the world. Bozer, a polar station construction chief, gets his own point-of-view chapter, and it lifts him from caricature to one of the best aspects of the book. Hovering over all is Cooper's sort-of "spirit animal," the British explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote the Antarctica classic The Worst Journey in the World. This new book would no doubt confound him but, in the end, bring him delight. Jokes lubricate a moving and occasionally preposterous story of love and death in the Antarctic cold.

Kirkus Reviews