South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

Overview

Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Fiction

One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the Year by Shelf Awareness and One of the Best Environmental Fiction Books of the Year by Earther

A warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world’s harshest place, Ashley Shelby's South Pole Station is a wry and witty debut novel about the courage it takes to band together when everything around you falls apart.

Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority? How many alcoholic drinks to you consume a week? Would you rather be a florist or a truck driver?

These are some of the questions that determine if you have what it takes to survive at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year. Cooper Gosling has just answered five hundred of them. Her results indicate she is abnormal enough for Polar life.

Cooper’s not sure if this is an achievement, but she knows she has nothing to lose. Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, she’s adrift at thirty and—despite her early promise as a painter—on the verge of sinking her career. So she accepts her place in the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica, where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. The only thing the Polies have in common is the conviction that they don’t belong anywhere else. Then a fringe scientist arrives, claiming climate change is a hoax. His presence will rattle this already-imbalanced community, bringing Cooper and the Polies to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

A warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world’s harshest place, Ashley Shelby's South Pole Station is a wry and witty debut novel about the courage it takes to band together when everything around you falls apart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250112828
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/03/2017
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

ASHLEY SHELBY is a former editor at Penguin and a prize-winning writer and journalist. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is the author of Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City, a narrative nonfiction account of the record-breaking flood that, in 1997, devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota. The short story that became the basis for South Pole Station is a winner of the Third Coast Fiction Prize; this is her first novel.

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

"I was dazzled by Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station—a terrifically witty, insightful, and satisfying novel, peopled by memorable misfits thrown together in a hothouse of conflicting interests in the frozen Antarctic."—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

"Ashley Shelby's debut South Pole Station is an absolute treasure. She's somehow written an infectious beach read about the coldest place on earth AND a stunning treatise on family, grief, creativity, and science. This book hits all the best notes of Where'd You Go, Bernadette? and Catch 22 and has the warmth and wit to carve its way into even the iciest of hearts."—John Jodzio, author of Knockout

"Prepare for the big chill! Ashley Shelby’s mismatched cast of characters are all powerfully drawn to the South Pole, each for their own reason; Shelby charts their respective courses with sensitivity, intelligence and grace. Here is a brave, original novel about leaving the known and familiar world in order to find it again."—Yona Zeldis McDonough, author The House on Primrose Pond

"South Pole Station is the brilliant story of artist and lost soul Cooper Gosling. In Antarctica, she meets the misfits and margin-dwellers with whom she has to navigate the webs of belief and knowledge, grief and hope, loneliness and love. South Pole Station reminds us that sometimes we have to go to the end of the earth to find what is within us."—Frank Bures, author of The Geography of Madness

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

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

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