The terrors of ice and darkness

At the centre of this multi-layered adventure novel is the fate of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition of the "Payer-Weyprecht-Expedition", which sets off in the Arctic summer of 1872 into the unexplored sea northeast of the Siberian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The expedition ship is soon - and forever - trapped by pack ice. After drifting through all the horrors of ice and darkness for more than a year, the crew, plagued by scurvy, discovers a group of islands buried under glaciers at the edge of the world and christens them "Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Land" in honour of a distant ruler. One of the last blind spots is thus erased from the map of the Old World. Parallel to the drama of this historical expedition, Ransmayr tells the story of a young Italian living in Vienna named Mazzini, who more than a hundred years later becomes the possessed Sam.