Arctic Summer

Arctic Summer

Damon Galgut

#3843 of 8,085 books · #617 in Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (2015).

Arctic Summer won the Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the 2015 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, and the 2015 University of Johannesburg English Literary Award. In 1912, the SS Birmingham approaches India. On board is Morgan Forster, novelist and man of letters, who is embarking on a journey of discovery. As Morgan stands on deck, the promise of a strange new future begins to take shape before his eyes. The seeds of a story start to gather at the corner of his mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. It will be another twelve years, and a second time spent in India, before A Passage to India, E. M. Forster's great work of literature, is published. During these years, Morgan will come to a profound understanding of himself as a man, and of the infinite subtleties and complexity of human nature, bringing these great insights to bear in his remarkable novel. At once a fictional exploration of the life and times of one of Britain's finest novelists, his struggle to find a way of living and being, and a stunningly vivid evocation of the mysterious alchemy of the creative process, Arctic Summer is a literary masterpiece, by one of the finest writers of his generation.