To research the Antarctic background for Sun at Midnight Rosie spent a month living with the scientists on a Bulgarian research station on Livingstone Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. Rosie Thomas is not only an author but a keen traveller and mountaineer which has provided her with excellent and well researched material for her novels.

Nevertheless I enjoyed the rest so much I'd certainly read another book by her. Alice and Rook really deserved something better and more real than this. I'd have given it four stars if it hadn't been for the last two chapters, which seemed to have been written with a Hollywood film deal in mind. In many ways she reminds me of Maggie O'Farrell, who is also so good at conveying strong emotion. Of course there are parts that are a bit implausible, but I thought she did a good job of making Alice's behaviour and reactions completely believable. The central idea of Alice living through an extreme experience that transforms her outlook on life appealed to me too. All the characters seemed like real individuals, the sort you think about after you've finished the book, wondering what they are doing now. I also liked her set of characters and the claustrophobic tension on the Antarctic base. I really enjoyed this escapist read I got so absorbed in the parts set in Antarctica that at one point I complained that the room was cold even though I was curled up on the sofa next to a blazing fire! Rosie Thomas is so good at conveying a sense of place, and I liked the fact that it was clear that she had been spellbound by Antarctica, Alice's feelings about it a reflection of hers. I'd never read or even heard of Rosie Thomas before this.

And it is in Antartica that she discovers something else that will change her life forever … if she survives. But there is a jolt of recognition between Alice and Rooker that is like nothing she has ever known. The isolation wipes out everyone's past, and tension crackles in the air. Nothing has prepared her for the beauty of it, or the claustrophobia of a tiny base shared with eight men and one other woman. He has taken a job working on the same small Antarctic research station.Īlice discovers an ice-blue and silver world, lit by sunlight. He's been running since his childhood in New Zealand. Then, with her relationship suddenly in pieces, she accepted an invitation to join a group working at the end of the earth: Antarctica. Six weeks earlier her life was comfortably unfolding in an Oxford summer. Instead of the familiar measurable world, everything that lies ahead of her is unknown and unpredictable. But now she stands alone on the deck of a rickety Chilean ship as a stark landscape reveals itself. An epic love story and adventure set against the stunning backdrop of Antarctica.Īlice Peel is a geologist.

Sun at Midnight by Rosie Thomas