`A troubling, hammering and glorious novel` DAVID MITCHELL On the edge of the Antarctic Circle, in the years after World War One, a steamship approaches a desolate island. On board is a young man on his way to assume the post of weather observer, to live in solitude for a year at the end of the earth. But on shore he finds no trace of the man whom he has been sent to replace, just a deranged castaway who has witnessed a horror he refuses to name. The rest is woods, a deserted cabin, rocks, silence and the surrounding sea. Then night begins to fall ...