The Snow Child

The Snow Child is the first novel by the American writer Eowyn Ivey, published in 2012 and set in Alaska in the 1920s.

Jack and Mabel are middle-aged and childless, and their move north is an attempt to begin again somewhere the past cannot follow them. Jack spends his days trying to clear ground before winter and Mabel cannot stop mourning, and the two of them are barely managing when a girl begins to appear at the edge of the trees, sometimes with a red fox, always gone before they can be sure she was there. The novel is based on a Russian folk tale about a child made of snow, and it moves between the magic the couple begins to half believe in and the practical life of the valley, including the neighbours, George and Esther Benson, and their son Garrett, who take the newcomers in hand. Ivey grew up in Alaska, and the book describes a homestead in the detail of somebody who has done the work.

It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was followed by further novels from the same author.