Icefields

At a quarter past three in the afternoon, on August 17, 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slipped on the ice of Arcturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slid into a crevasse.

So begins Thomas Wharton's amazing first novel. Set amidst the stunning, and sometimes lethal, beauty of the Canadian Rockies (the term "Arctic" has not yet been coined), the story is presented within the frame of a tourist guidebook and records a world and people on the brink - people trying to build a society in a land where nature's power rules supreme, trying to rationalize phenomena for which there is no scientific explanation, trying to forge relationships in a place where the cold seems to keep hearts frozen. It is a story of love, death, war, passion, and ultimately faith and unlike anything you have ever read before.