This novel has three sections: Lean, Fall, and Stand. In the first Doc, an old hand at Antarctic sojourns makes some very poor choices when he’s out on the ice near an Antarctic research station with two novices. It becomes clear that Doc has had a stroke. In the second section Doc’s wife, Anna, travels to Santiago in Chile to try and find a way through what’s happened to Doc who is in hospital there. In the third section Doc comes home to England and Anna has to become his carer. It’s a difficult thankless task, but eventually it is Doc who begins to find his own way through what’s happened to him. The powerful terror of the snowstorm in the first section is tremendous, as the three men out on the ice struggle to communicate – a wonderful metaphor for Doc’s aphasia in the next two sections. I found the whole novel absolutely riveting and it’s very likely to be in my top reads of the year.
A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR'It leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story' Hilary MantelThe highly anticipated new novel from the Costa-award winning, three-times Booker-longlisted author of Reservoir 13.When an Antarctic research expedition goes wrong, the consequences are far-reaching - for the men involved and for their families back home.Robert "Doc" Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, holds the clues to what happened, but he is no longer able to communicate them. While Anna, his wife, navigates the sharp contours of her new life as a carer, Robert is forced to learn a whole new way to be in the world.Award-winning novelist Jon McGregor returns with a stunning novel that mesmerizingly and tenderly unpicks the notion of heroism and explores the indomitable human impulse to tell our stories - even when words fail us. A meditation on the line between sacrifice and selfishness this is a story of the undervalued, unrecognised courage it can take just to get through the day.'So moving and delicate and terrifying and haunting' Maggie O'Farrell.