Elleke Boehmer is the author of a wide range of books including fiction, biography, award-winning history and literary criticism. She has published five novels including Screens Against the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize, 1990), and The Shouting in the Dark (co-winner of the EASA Olive Schreiner Prize, 2015). Her two short-story collections are Sharmilla, and Other Portraits (2010), and To the Volcano (2019, with "Supermarket Love" commended for the Australian Review of Books Elizabeth Jolley Prize). Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Her novels Bloodlines (2000) and Nile Baby (2008) were published in Mandarin in China in 2024. Her website is here.
The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.
Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them. Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.
You can read more about Ice Shock on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.
Leah Nash was not looking for love. Love was the last thing she needed. That winter morning, she wanted only to get out of town and head home.
But then the trains south from Edinburgh were cancelled. Floods on the line. So here she was at the coach station, ten minutes to spare, dragging her backpack up into the London coach.
Yesterday’s interview had taken everything. It had felt like her life depended on the outcome—the fulfilment of every dream she’d ever had. The shelf of books she would one day write.
But had they liked her? The seven blank faces at the long table gave away nothing. She had blundered on through, ears ringing.
"Sorry, could you repeat that, please?" she’d asked twice, three times. "I didn’t quite get the question."
Niall Lawrence wasn’t looking for love either. Leant up against the coach window, he was trying to get home, too. Kent, via London. But he did like to be loved. That idea of a love-match, a soul-mate—this past weekend something had changed about that. He’d been up north for a school friend’s wedding. Steph, who was marrying Rosie. He’d watched the couple take their first dance, looking into each other’s eyes, faces glowing, never dropping their gaze, and he’d thought—amazing.
So if someone this early morning had asked him about love—say this nameless stranger with red-brown hair in the seat beside his, asleep on his shoulder, uninvited—then he might have said yes, carefully. "But," he might have added, "I don’t think I’ve met them yet."
The stranger stretched her arm across his waist.
Inside her evaporating sleep, the body under her arm was warm, warmer than her own.
Niall felt her breath on his face, feathering his cheek.
A jolt. The coach engine coughed deep and low under their feet. Leah opened her eyes, rubbed her temple. She saw pale eyes, somehow bearably close-by. Curious, maybe quizzical. The man they belonged to must have been cradling her for some time. She was slumped half across his chest.
Beyond his head, she saw London’s brown fuzz begin to thicken along the horizon.
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