South Pole Station: A Novel

By Ashley Shelby

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781250112859

Ashley Shelby

Ashley Shelby is 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 devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1997. Her short story that became the basis for South Pole Station won the Third Coast Fiction Prize.

Reviews for South Pole Station

[nyiper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I agree with another reviewer---there was so much detail to give you a mental picture of the South Pole that it IS hard to believe the author wasn't actually THERE for some period of time. I was listening to the CD---while I was raking---and the CD was over before my raking is finished---good story for a project---but it almost made me colder than the weather I was raking in!! I liked the whole climate discussion --- we need so much more emphasis on the whole problem so it was great that the author handled it so well, even in a novel.

[auntmarge64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Accepted to travel to the South Pole as a visiting artist, Cooper Gosling details her trip and the extraordinary lives she meets at the base. There are rivalries, pairings, and wonderfully distinct characters whose back stories are often included. Into the mix of the scientists, who are in the middle of a three-year experiment to confirm or deny the Big Bang, comes a climate change denier forced on the base by a pair of right-wing Congressmen who have threatened polar funding. The author's sister has overwintered at the Pole, so I think the atmosphere among the Polies is probably drawn pretty accurately. These are serious people, made so largely by the physical dangers and restrictions of the place: close quarters, infrequent baths, too much or too little daylight, and killer temperatures. Combine this with very strong personalities, competition among the scientists' visions, tensions between the scientists and the maintenance crew, and, of course, the presence of a science denier. The scientists are appalled by his presence, not least because working at the Pole is very, very serious life-and-death business, not to be messed with just to make a political statement. This man's presence is central to the story, but it actually works in quite nicely and doesn't turn the book into a thriller, thank goodness. I had only one complaint in a book I otherwise loved: the climate change denier's backstory is told in some detail, and I really, really didn't care what his personal reasons were. I skimmed that section and didn't think it was necessary to include it at all. Skip that section and give yourself a wonderful read about a place you'll probably never be able to experience yourself.

[bogopea · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought this was a thought provoking book touched with a bit of humor. In a small way I kept thinking of Catch-22, with it's cast of characters. Largely, it is about survival, physically and mentally. In this case, survival in one of the most remote places on earth, for one year, among a large group of unrelated people and (in many cases strangers to each other) and their reason or need for being there. It also made me ponder where is "home". It's not the same for everyone Sometimes people find a home far from that in which they were either raised or made themselves. For them it could also be the first step in survival. The other serious point it made is the destruction places like South Pole Station impose on mankind. What was once a pristine environment is now clogged with diesel trucks and construction of small cities, human waste and other things that threaten our world over time. The flyleaf states it is "a warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world's harshest place". I'm glad it called to me from the library shelf.

[ethel55_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cooper is unmoored--her family faced the tragic suicide of her twin and she is in a field that is difficult to be successful at overnight. Cooper's father, Bill Gosling, practically raised them on bedtime stories involving the various expeditions to the Antarctic region. So much so, those were some of the games the siblings played as children. When an opportunity arrives in the form of an artist in residence post from the National Science Federation, Cooper jumps at the chance to endure the rigorous training and eventually wind up in Antarctica. It's not too surprising that there is a diverse group populating the South Pole Station. Some of the narrative moves between them and the overall scientific community. The addition of a climate change denier drives a good portion of the book, as the scientitists and other members of the community go head to head. There was a lot of information about the base and life on that base. It was very vivid, I had trouble believing the author hadn't spent time there as well.

[out1and1about · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Three stars. Decent book, I finished, but not something I particularly enjoyed. Good premise, good them, interesting setting, but very little forward motion.

The story dragged. The characters were interesting but way too much backstory at random times throughout. And the author settled down after awhile, but the overuse of complicated words that added nothing to the story was disruptive to the plot development.

I appreciated the theme and the overall goal of the story, that science should be inclusive as long as it's good science, and not all good science produces definitive proof, but even the theme was treated with too much high-brow arrogance.