Category: Event

Blackwell’s, Broad Street Oxford

Dec 3 from 5:30pm to 6:30pm GMT

Overview

Join us for a discussion chaired by Lara Feigel with Elleke Boehmer, author of the new book ‘Ice Shock’

Ice Shock

The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.

Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them. Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.

“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

Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer is the author of the novels Screens against the Sky (shortlisted David Higham Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize, 2000), Nile Baby (2008) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015; co-winner Olive Schreiner prize, 2015–18), as well as the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). To the Volcano, her second short story collection, appeared in 2019. The story ‘Supermarket Love’ was commended for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. Her fiction probes the delicate interface between our private and public selves in haunting and unforgettable ways.

She is also Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a founding figure in the field of postcolonial literature. Her edition of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was a 2004 summer bestseller, and her acclaimed biography of Nelson Mandela (2008) has been translated into Arabic, Malaysian, Thai, Kurdish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. She has published several other books including Stories of Women (2005), the anthology Empire Writing (1998), Indian Arrivals: Networks of British Empire (2015), and Postcolonial Poetics (2018).

Lara Feigel

Lara Feigel is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel. Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for the Guardian and contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Her new book, Custody: The Secret History of Mothers comes out in January 2026.