Nordic Book Club, November 2026

Join us in November as the Nordic Book Club reads A Woman in the Polar Night, a classic memoir by Austrian adventurer Christiane Ritter (1938). The translation is by Jane Degras (2024), with a foreword by Sara Wheeler.

From the publisher (Pushkin Press Classics):

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,…