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 will soon - and forever - be trapped by the 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. Parallel to the drama of this historical expedition, Ransmayr tells the story of a young Italian living in Vienna by the name of Mazzini, who more than a hundred years later becomes an obsessive collector of all the testimonies and documents left behind by the "Payer-Weyprecht Expedition" and finally sets off into the Arctic Ocean as a passenger of a Norwegian research ship to reconstruct the discovery of "Franz-Joseph-Land". But in the course of his research into the history of polar discovery, Mazzini gets deeper and deeper into the Arctic present and finally disappears, a sledge traveller, in the glacial landscapes of Spitsbergen.