A Woman in the Polar Night

By: Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras - translator, Sara Wheeler - foreword

Narrated by: Rebecca Gallagher

This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content," but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies . . . But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.

©2010 Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin (P)2024 Tantor

I was soo cold reading this book!!

I can’t understand why someone would want to do this but I do understand once you complete it, how amazing it feels!! I thought it was a good audio book.

A remarkable book

I loved every minute of this book. If you are someone who enjoys various kinds of adventure books—hiking, camping, extreme travel of various sorts—you’ll enjoy this one. It’s well written and not a bad translation. I can see why the original has never gone out of print in German.

The visual imagery the writing provoked, really the overall sensory impact

Such beautiful writing about a very unique place in the world. The author observed so much! We visited Svalbard this last summer, and I enjoyed ré-experiencing natural wildlife and other things I noticed and thought about the area. Adding the description of surviving the winter piqued my imagination.