Congratulations to Harry Whitehead, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, on the publication of his second novel, White Road!
Harry Whitehead is a novelist and director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and its annual free lit-fest, Literary Leicester. His first novel The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin) was reviewed as "powerful, brave, ambitious" (The Globe & Mail), "a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive" (Quill & Quire). White Road (Claret) is his second. He’s published short stories, reviews, essays and more in a wide variety of genres. Currently, he’s writing a novel about climate change in the Himalayas.
White Road tells the story of an oil rig that explodes in the High Arctic just as winter is setting in and the environmental disaster that follows. Carrie, a Scottish-born rescue swimmer, is lost, presumed dead, after the accident. Only she can answer the questions about what really happened, but first she must find her way back to civilisation across the polar wilderness in the Arctic night.
Below, you can read a short section from the novel. Carrie is stranded on the sea ice, with a badly injured back, following an ice ridge beside open water south. The ice is rapidly breaking up after an abrupt change in the weather. And she’s about to realise the true extent of the environmental disaster unfolding somewhere out there on the dark ocean.
Clutching the walking poles, she leaned forward to haul the heavy sled, but her back hurt so fiercely she had to crouch down instead. She pressed her fists into her temples. Squeezed through the hood, trying somehow to reduce the agony. She needed focus. At any moment, this ice slab would break free of its mooring and she’d be marooned on a crumbling, free-floating berg on the ocean.
Crying out with each step, she slogged forward over the ice’s dancing surface. Its shivering movement, the way it dropped and rose, meant her legs hardly knew what to do. Her knees gave way at the wrong moment. Her rump slammed down on her ankles, and her back exploded in anguish.
But now the ice ridge beside her began to come apart in earnest. Fragments showered down on her. Looking up, she saw one giant slab, big as a pick-up truck, teetering one way and the other. Desperately, she picked up her pace, adrenalin numbing the physical anguish.
A tearing clamour, snaps, a series of bangs and then a sizzling rush. The weight of the sled against her harness abruptly vanished. Over her shoulder, she saw it lifted up on a wave of smashed ice and roiling water where the ridge had come down behind her. She had time to take another step before the sled whipped her legs away and she collapsed on top of it. She careered forward amid the wave’s roar. A ball of ice two feet thick whistled past her head. The water and slush-ice gushed about her body. She was screaming.
At last, it stopped. She lay still, arched diagonally over the sled like a sacrifice across an altar. The water’s confusion subsided. Carrie fidgeted the sled harness from her waist, dragged herself to her feet. The floe she’d just escaped was turning away like some stately liner leaving dock. A mass of smaller ice chunks still cascaded down the broken ridge-end into the frothing sea.
Her arms, her body, glimmered in subtly refracting colours. For a time, she just stared at herself in fascination. She was hallucinating. Then she understood. Where the water had washed over her, she was covered in a thin film of oil.
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