Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Minds of Winter

Author: Ed O'Loughlin

Narrator: Bill Webster

Format: Unabridged

Length: 17 hrs and 44 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-12-17

Publisher: Anansi Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Longlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Longlisted for the 2017 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

It begins with a chance encounter at the top of the world.

Fay Morgan and Nelson Nilsson have each arrived in Inuvik, Canada, about 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Both are in search of answers about a family member: Nelson for his estranged older brother, and Fay for her vanished grandfather. Driving Fay into town from the airport on a freezing January night, Nelson reveals a folder left behind by his brother. An image catches Fay's eye: a clock she has seen before. Soon Fay and Nelson realize that their relatives have an extraordinary and historic connection - a secret share in one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of polar expedition. This is the riddle of the "Arnold 294" chronometer, which reappeared in Britain more than a hundred years after it was lost in the Arctic with the ships and men of Sir John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition. The secret history of this elusive timepiece, Fay and Nelson will discover, ties them and their families to a journey that echoes across two centuries.

In a feat of extraordinary scope and ambition, Ed O'Loughlin moves between a frozen present and an ever thawing past. Minds of Winter is a novel about ice and time and their ability to preserve or destroy, of mortality and loss and our dreams of transcending them.

Members Reviews:

Incredibly intriguing. I've read it twice already from library ...

Incredibly intriguing. I've read it twice already from library. Now my own copy to reread and share. Real people and their real actions that make no sense unless they were being directed. By whom? Why?

Failures of Navigation

âBroughton Island. Cape Dyer. Cape Mercy. Brevoort Island. Loks

Land. Resolution Island. Cape Kakaviak. Saglek. Cape Kiglapait.

Big Bay. Tukialik. Cartwright.

Do we believe in these places? she wondered. Was that it? Does

it matter so long as we can say their names?

Before the advent of GPS, navigation required the accurate measurement of both space and time. You would think that Ed O'Loughlin's ambitious historical novel of polar exploration has both: it is replete with maps; and it begins with the (true) discovery of a chronometer belonging to one of the one of the most tragic of arctic expeditions, that led by Sir John Franklin in 1845. But the reader requires navigation too. O'Loughlin's journeys take him to both hemispheres and many countries, over a 175-year span, switching with dizzying speed. Alas, though fascinated by the subject, I could hardly keep up. I found myself careening from segment to section without much overall sense of direction. This is a book about navigation whose own navigation largely fails.

Those maps, first of all. There are dozens of them, but their connection to the text they accompany is often non-existent. There are three of them in the first few pages, all slightly different, but all showing similar areas of the Arctic. You read a passage involving some place names, you turn back to look it up, but you don't know which of the three maps to turn to, and chances are you won't find it anyway. Each of the nine sections in the novel is marked with a location and precise compass coordinates, but much of the action takes place somewhere else.