The ice museum 

The Ice Museum is an account of a poetic tour through northern lands. It's also a history of ideas about remote Arctic places. As the narrator travels, strains from the past keep her company - centrally the classical idea of a land called Thule, a northern Atlantis, seen once and never found again. The route takes her through the lands that have been called Thule: from Shetland to Iceland, Norway, Estonia and Greenland.

There are cameos from former travellers: Richard Burton, Anthony Trollope, W. H. Auden, and Fridtjof Nansen. There are dark moments: the Thule Society, founded after the First World War, had Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess amongst its members. The narrator reaches an isolated US military base called Thule; she finds Arctic poets, Inuit musicians and Polar scientists. Finally, she arrives at Svalbard, a beautiful archipelago at the edge of the frozen ocean.​