Published by Valley Press (UK) and Karavan Press (South Africa), 2025
An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Overhead, the skies are severely blue. Leah Nash and Niall Lawrence, twenty-somethings in love, grow strangely restless. They set out on different but parallel pathways. He takes on work at an Antarctic polar station and experiences the strange and lonely beauty of the precarious ice-world. She studies writing in England and struggles to find her way. They are both determined to stay together though separated by thousands of miles.
Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock is a love-story set against the backdrop of the melting ice-caps. The novel asks what it is to be close even when we are far apart—distant yet proximate. How do we go on loving each other when the environment around us is changing catastrophically by the day?’
“Ice Shock is a propulsive and eerie love-story told frame by perilous frame. Threat lurks everywhere in the gaps, beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ real and imagined Antarctic worlds.”
—Jason Allen-Paisant
“Light, of all kinds and colours, and the volatile seasonal uncertainty of our world, shapes this warm-blooded love story—and interferes disturbingly with it. A terrific, atmospheric novel that is also a study in thinking and learning how to be a writer.”
—Kirsty Gunn
“Elleke Boehmer has given us a love story worth telling. The embrace of a man and a woman, separated by the distance between them—and yet so close. There is no beginning and no end, just the overpowering force of nature, the melting of the polar ice, swallowing life and the dreams of lovers.”
—Véronique Tadjo
“Leah and Niall meet by chance on the night bus from Edinburgh to London and fall in love. They agree to ‘give each other space’ and find themselves separated by a longitudinal parabola that stretches their commitment to breaking point … Elleke Boehmer’s lucid gaze forces the reader to imagine in a more-than-Antarctic light the lacunae of human communication, the relentless otherness of the physical world, and the sheer distance between global ‘north’ and ‘south’.”
—Terence Cave
