An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Overhead, the skies are severely blue. Leah Nash and Niall Lawrence, twenty-somethings in love, grow strangely restless. They set out on different but parallel pathways. He takes on work at an Antarctic polar station and experiences the strange and lonely beauty of the precarious ice-world. She studies writing in England and struggles to find her way. They are both determined to stay together though separated by thousands of miles.
Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock is a love-story set against the backdrop of the melting ice-caps. The novel asks what it is to be close even when we are far apart—distant yet proximate. How do we go on loving each other when the environment around us is changing catastrophically by the day?’
PRAISE FOR ICE SHOCK
“Ice Shock is a propulsive and eerie love-story told frame by perilous frame. Threat lurks everywhere in the gaps, beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ real and imagined Antarctic worlds.”—Jason Allen-Paisant, winner of the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023
“Light, of all kinds and colours, and the volatile seasonal uncertainty of our world, shapes this warm-blooded love story—and interferes disturbingly with it. A terrific, atmospheric novel that is also a study in thinking and learning how to be a writer.”—Kirsty Gunn, author of The Boy and the Sea, Caroline’s Bikini and other novels
“Elleke Boehmer has given us a love story worth telling. The embrace of a man and a woman, separated by the distance between them—and yet so close. There is no beginning and no end, just the overpowering force of nature, the melting of the polar ice, swallowing life and the dreams of lovers.”—Véronique Tadjo, author of In the Company of Men
“Leah and Niall meet by chance on the night bus from Edinburgh to London and fall in love. They agree to ‘give each other space’ and find themselves separated by a longitudinal parabola that stretches their commitment to breaking point … Elleke Boehmer’s lucid gaze forces the reader to imagine in a more-than-Antarctic light the lacunae of human communication, the relentless otherness of the physical world, and the sheer distance between global ‘north’ and ‘south’.”—Terence Cave, author of Recognitions and Live Artefacts
ISBN: 978-1-0370-5782-3
Publication date: 16 May 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Durban, South Africa, ELLEKE BOEHMER writes fiction, history, criticism and biography. She is the author of five novels, including Screens against the Sky (shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), Bloodlines (shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize), Nile Baby and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize), and two collections of short stories. Elleke’s To the Volcano, and Other Stories was commended for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, 2019. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Other titles include Indian Arrivals (European Society for English Studies prize-winner, 2016); Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023); Stories of Women (2005); Southern Imagining (2025). Since 2008, she is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.
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