Svalbard

Far above Norway, closer to the North Pole than to Oslo, lies Svalbard: a frozen archipelago of glaciers, polar bears, abandoned mines and contested history.

For centuries it belonged to no one. Then everyone came.

Dutch explorers searching for a route to China found jagged mountains rising from the Arctic sea. Whalers followed, turning the bays red with blood and boiling blubber on the shore. Russian Pomor hunters wintered in darkness, trappers stalked fox and bear across the ice, and scientists came north to measure a world few people had seen. When coal was discovered beneath the frozen ground, Svalbard became something more dangerous: a prize.

From the doomed voyages of Willem Barentsz to the blubber towns of the seventeenth century, from Russian hunting camps and polar expeditions to the Svalbard Treaty, Nazi raids, Soviet mining towns, Cold War suspicion and today's warming frontier, this is the story of an Arctic no-man's-land that became one of the strangest strategic territories on earth.

Norway governs it. Russia still has rights there. The treaty forbids warlike use. The ice is retreating. The old certainties are melting with it.

Svalbard: A History of the Cold Edge is a gripping account of survival, greed, law, empire and climate at the top of the world - a place once seen as empty, but never truly free from ambition.