'Adrian Caesar's chilling prose transported me right back into the heart of Antarctica. This is a magnificent re-telling of those two fateful expeditions of 1912.' – Ranulph Fiennes



Mawson decided to turn north ... when he was suddenly plummeted downwards with the fearful rush of nightmare. As the rope and harness attaching him to the sledge unravelled, so did his hope. But then he was arrested by a mighty jerk which felt as if it might remove his weakened arms. The rope pulled up, and he was suspended, slowly revolving fourteen feet into a giant grave of ice. He felt the sledge tugged by his weight towards the lid of the crevasse. So this is the end, he thought.



It is 1912, the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Scott's journey has ended. Mawson's is just beginning. Adrian Caesar's stunning stroke of imaginative recreation transports us to the last days of those perilous expeditions in the heart of the white continent.



Sweeping through deaths and disasters with the pace and inevitability of a thriller, The White inexorably lays bare the forces that drove these two adventurers, the values that inspired them, and the remorseless obsession that dominated them.