I May Be Some Time - by Francis Spufford (Paperback)

About the Book

This "hauntingly well-written" ("Booklist") work takes readers on a journey to the center of the human imagination, offering a thrilling cultural history of the human obsession with polar exploration--the call of vast empty spaces and the seductive beauty of untrodden snow. of photos.

Book Synopsis

Francis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination . . ." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional history of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of the polar explorers as they headed toward destinies like Terra Nova. Serving up a heady brew of Captain Perry, Jane Eyre, gastronomic obsessions with iced desserts, and the daily lives of Eskimos, Spufford treats the reader to one of the most satisfying and imaginative contemporary works dealing with exploration and human need.

Review Quotes

". . . a high-cultural history, both passionate and intricate . . . Breathtaking." --The Boston Globe

"An engaging, elegant, often majestic work of cultural history." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Thoughtful, suggestive and oddly fascinating." --Men's Journal

About the Author

Francis Spufford, writes for the Guardian, has edited two anthologies and lives in Cambridge, England with his wife and daughter. For this, his first book, he received a Somerset Maughm Award and was namedThe Sunday Times (London) Young Writer of the Year.