A Dream in Polar Fog »

In the 1950s Yuri Rytcheu emerged as not only a writer of considerable literary talent, but as the unique voice of a small national minority. His fiction about Chukotka and the people who inhabit the extreme north of Siberia introduced readers to their history and mythology. Rytcheu has been published in Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Denmark, and France. Born in Belarus, Chavasse came to the US with her family in 1989. She studied English at Vassar and Oxford, then did a Masters in English Literature at University College London. She lives in London with her husband.

A mythic journey of discovery, lyrical ethnographic fable, empathetic chronicle of the Chukchi. A cross-cultural encounter.

Publishers Weekly

Siberian-born author Rytkheu chronicles a Canadian sailor's life among the Chukchi people of northeastern Siberia in a lyrical, instructional novel that reads like an adventure story wrapped around an ethnography. When ice traps John MacLennan's ship in the Bering Strait in 1910, not far from a Chukchi settlement, the youthful, na ve sailor, trying to widen a small fissure in the ice with dynamite, blows up his hands. His captain hires several Chukchi men to take him by dogsled to a Russian doctor-a long, arduous journey-and vows that the ship will wait for his safe return. But when gangrene sets in, John's hands must be amputated by a medicine woman, and when strong winds break the ice shelf mooring the Belinda, the ship sails without him. The rest of the novel details John's integration into the Chukchi world: adapting to his handicap, adopting Chukchi ways and finding friendship-and love-among his hosts. Even John's role in the tragic, accidental death of his best friend, Toko, only pulls him deeper into the community's folds. Rytkheu's clear, compassionate prose ("Winter days resemble one another like twins") ably evokes a foreign, fragile world. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.