On a late summer jaunt in the mountains, siblings Rowan, Dialfi, and Orry Yngling discover a tarnished copper box covered with mysterious engravings. It contains a book written in runes of the gnomads, a despised people who wander the polar wastes with their herds of caribou and mehemoths. The Ynglings themselves are Nuathans – proud descendants of renegade scientists who colonized Antarctica to ride out global warming several thousand years ago, who prize learning and rationality to this day. Rowan, however, unlike studious Dialfi and nautical-minded Orry, is a bit of black sheep, who has yet to find a calling in life.
Rowan becomes obsessed with translating the runes, going to great lengths to befriend a gnomad and in the process coming to question the usually unassailable Nuathan assumption of superiority. The book turns out to be a diary written by a teenager who witnessed this Founding, and as they piece together her story, they learn that some less savory aspects of their past have been conveniently forgotten, if not suppressed.
Meanwhile, an unusually hard winter brings hunger and raiders to their shores. The diary ends with the warning that their world will one day be threatened with renewed danger from a changing climate, which rings all too true. But will a controversial account of the Founding, translated by a ragtag group of youngsters, be taken seriously by the powerful and arrogant scholars who rule their society?
If you love compelling characters and richly imagined worlds, and are intrigued at the idea of viewing our present conundrum through the lens of the distant future, this is the book for you. Download
Beyond This Bitter Air
, and like Rowan open the pages of a faraway time and place, caught between actuality and potentiality, prophecy and exhortation; haunting, impossible, and yet real.