Polaris

takes one expedition — a squadron of British ships that vanished into the Arctic, a ship designed to be frozen and drift across the North Pole, a race to the South Pole won on skis and lost on foot, a rowboat crossing of the Southern Ocean after the ice crushed the ship — and rebuilds it: the map they were trying to finish, the men and the ships they bet on, the ice as it actually behaves, the moment it turned, and who came home.

From William Barentsz spending the first polar winter in a house built of driftwood, to Fridtjof Nansen drifting for three years in the Fram, to Ernest Shackleton, Douglas Mawson, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, Polaris is the history of human beings at the limit of what a body can endure. Meticulously researched, honest about the disputes that remain unsettled, and clear about the difference between the record and the legend. Clean and suitable for all ages. A new expedition every week