Rennie Parker, "Daughters of the Last Campaign"

Rennie Parker is a poet and FE worker, living in Lincolnshire. She has published several collections with Shoestring Press, her latest one being Balloons and Stripey Trousers.

She grew up in Leeds, and worked in tourism before researching a PhD at Birmingham Uni. Since then, she has worked in community arts and museums, taught literature, published criticism as well as poetry, and takes part in regional bookfairs and events. 

About Daughters of the Last Campaign, by Rennie Parker
The race to the South Pole, 1909 – 1911. What if a female expedition had really gone ahead? Meet Lady Helena the obsessive leader, her not-too-bright companion Gloria … and a third expeditioneer from (no!) a lower social class. Meanwhile, a modern-day researcher attempts to make sense of it all, hindered by a bitter descendant and a raft of eccentric enthusiasts. There is, of course, a re-enactment society who are going to deliver a LARP weekend, and an unwilling research supervisor who dislikes his supervisee; not to mention Major "Blaze" Fender-Bowen, who takes time out from his next TV series to speak with our contemporary heroine. What a shame the photographs from 1910 are so bad; is it possible that the whole expedition was a gigantic hoax? Join the intrepid Elizabeth Winsome Gardiner as she hauls a sledge across the white continent, acting as diarist, scientist, cook, and navigator. 

You can read more about Daughters of the Last Campaign on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Daughters of the Last Campaign
[Our 3-woman team is about to journey South. However, the paying-guest member, EWG, was recruited in a hurry thanks to a funding crisis.]

- Here you are. Compass, solar compass, chronometer, theodolite, sextant, map of the continent, Hansard’s Directory of Navigational Techniques, and a planar alidade.

- A what?

          I stood there astonished, holding out an irregular pile of scientific instruments which she had clattered into my arms.

- But, Lady Helena. The problem is –

          Gloria barged in with:

- And don’t forget the sledge meter; that’s the big bicycle wheel thingy on the end.

- But Lady Helena –

- Oh don’t look so glum, Dr. Gardiner. There will be plenty of opportunities for your medical pursuits. You can do all your scientific gubbins when we’re out there; it won’t be all typing and dictation, you know.

- But, Lady Helena. I am not a scientist. That is what I’ve been trying to say.

- But you’re a doctor. You said so.

- I am a musicologist. Doctor of Music. Didn’t you get my references?

          While Lady H. considered this important statement, Gloria said:

- Not medical then. Not one of those useful doctors.

- No. I’m an early music specialist. Sumer is icumen in, lhude syng cuccu.

- But you went to Newnham!

- Girton.

- And the Royal College.

- Royal College of Music. The RCM.

- So you’re not medical then.

- No. Whatever gave you that idea.

          There was a long pause. Seagulls cried overhead, and I heard the anchor rattling up on its chain.

- Oh bugger. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.

          She turned towards me with a horrified expression, but before she could say anything, there was a raucous blast from the funnel. The deck underneath me began to slant and ride; then I suddenly found we were slipping away from the jetty, and a length of dirty green water was separating us from the land I loved. Only one question remained. What on earth was a planar alidade?

Elleke Boehmer, "Ice Shock"

 

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 to date, 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.

About Ice Shock, by Elleke Boehmer
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. 

From Ice Shock
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.