Afterlands

Afterlands is a historical novel by the Canadian writer Steven Heighton, published in 2005. It is built around a real Arctic expedition, and it uses the diaries and memoir of one of the men who was on the ice.

The Polaris set out in 1872 with a crew drawn from several countries, together with a number of women and children, and it spent months locked in the ice off Greenland. When the ship and the ice floe separated, a group of the expedition was left adrift with their supplies and without a captain they could trust.

Heighton tells the story chiefly through two of the survivors. One is George Tyson, the American who eventually takes charge of the floe and manages to bring it towards water where sealers and steamers pass. The other is Kruger, a German who distrusts the crew's instinct for taking sides and who forms an attachment to the expedition's translator, Tukulito, a married Inuit woman known to the others as Hannah. The book is about what a group of people does to one another when the thing that keeps them together is the ice they are standing on.