This Cold Heaven

Greenland lies at the heart of Gretel Ehrlich’s decade-long fascination with landscape, culture, and survival. This Cold Heaven weaves travel, history, and cultural anthropology to bring the island’s people, terrain, and elemental beauty vividly to life, revealing an Arctic world rarely seen from within.

“Thrilling. . . . A stunning portrait of a people and the landscape that shaped them.” –The New York Times Book Review

Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.”

This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.