Wintery Historical Fiction To Read in December

A group of extraordinary women are tasked with journeying into the Artic to search for the lost Franklin Expedition in 1853. Experienced trail guide, Virginia Reeve, is to lead them. But one year later, she is on trial back in Boston. Not all of the woman returned from the expedition. In an alternating timeline, the perilous journey unfolds, taking readers on an unforgettable and heart-pounding adventure across the Arctic and in the courtroom as the trial seeks to answer one question: what happened out there on the ice?

At one of Stalin’s infamous work camps in the coldest reaches of Siberia, a young Lithuanian girl along with her mother and little brother are forced to dig for beets and survive in the cruelest of conditions. Lina finds solace the only way she knows how: in drawings she hopes will find their way to her father’s prison camp and show him the rest of their family is still alive. It’s a haunting tale of survival and hope.

Growing up in a small, Arctic town in Nunavut in the 1970s, a girl experiences the power of ice and nature, the ravages of alcohol in her community, and the violence around her. But the electrifying proximity of the animal world is everywhere, too, and with it all the blurred lines between good and evil, human and animal, real and imagined. This lyrical poem from internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq is a fierce and tender story unlike any other.

In Finnmark, the northernmost region of Norway, a fishing village loses almost the entire male population during a terrible storm. The women of Vardø must now fend for themselves. That would be all fine and good if not for the arrival of Absalom Cornet. Having burned witches already in Scotland, he comes now with a new mission to bring God to this place and root out evil. And all he sees when he looks at the independent women of Vardø surviving the harsh conditions on their own without the help of their men is evil.

How did Ada Blackjack, a young Inupiat woman, become the lone survivor of a doomed Arctic expedition in 1921, enduring for two years before a rescue party could break through the ice to find her? The answers lie within A Line of Driftwood. After discovering her Blackjack’s diary in the Dartmouth archives, Diane Glancy wrote this remarkable tale based on the historical record and Ada Blackjack’s own testimony. It is a story of endurance, hardship, and faith, as one woman survives where four “experts” cannot.

With his latest book a publishing failure, Charles Dickens is given an ultimatum: write a Christmas book within the month or his publishers will call in his debts and he will lose everything. Reluctant, but desperate, the famed writer has no choice but to agree in this sentimental tale of how one of the most famous Christmas stories ever came to be.