Hand over hand, Petersen drew the rope out of the water. The gap between the two ice pans was barely a foot wide. Morgan watched the man coiling the rope nicely onto the ice. Inside him, a stupid hope had already bred, that the boy might still be attached to the end of it. He would come up laughing and spluttering, amused as much as relieved.

Morgan is second-in-command of the brig Impetus, dispatched in 1852 to the Arctic in search of Franklin’s lost expedition. It is late in the year and the ice is closing in when Morgan, ensconced in this wholly masculine world, learns that the ship is carrying a stowaway - a woman. Pregnant with his child. It is too late to turn back. The child will be born into this vast frozen wilderness. And Morgan must set out on a voyage of deliverance across a bleak expanse as shifting, stubborn and treacherous as human nature itself.