A Woman in the Polar Night

In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, told her husband, who had spent the last few years living off the land on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, that she wanted to join him. And so she does, spending the full, dark winter in a tiny hut with her husband and a young Norwegian friend, who admitted later he was looking forward to watching her lose her mind. She keeps her sanity, grounded by her good humor and the constant tasks required to survive, but it's as if she found a whole new mind in that year, broadened by the isolation and the fierce elements. It's a spare and beautiful book, bright in its vision against the months of darkness it records.