A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

Hudson Booksellers Book of the Year

One of the New York Post’s Best Books of the Summer

One of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

IndieNext Pick

A Time Magazine “What to Read Now” Selection

A wry novel set at the edge of the earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart

Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and on the verge of ruining her career. So when the opportunity arises to join the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance—and finds herself in the company of others who are just abnormal enough for Polar life, a group of eccentrics motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. When they are joined by a fringe scientist who claims climate change is a hoax, the Polies’ already-imbalanced community is rattled, bringing them to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

Ashley Shelby is a novelist, short story writer, and former environmental journalist. She is author of Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, and Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. She lives in the Twin Cities.

"A ramblingly entertaining first novel."—The New York Times Book Review

"South Pole Station crackles with energy."—The Washington Post

"A lovely, satirical, and emotionally complex novel."—LitHub

"With South Pole Station’s satire, science, wry wit, and warmth, Ashley Shelby has written one of the best novels of the year."—Shelf Awareness

"This is a fascinating novel, loaded with interesting history of Antarctic exploration, current scientific operations, and the living and working conditions of those folks brave enough to endure six months of darkness and six months of daylight."—Publishers Weekly

"Shelby’s first novel eschews easy choices and treats interpersonal relations, grief, science, art, and political controversy with the same deft, humorous hand. Readers will find characters to love, suspect, and identify with among Cooper’s fellow Polies and won’t forget them easily."—Booklist

"Shelby’s writing is pithy and funny . . . In this unusual, entertaining first novel, Ashley Shelby combines science with literature to make a clever case for scientists’ and artists’ shared conviction that ‘the world could become known if only you looked hard enough.’"—NPR