Alice Peel is a geologist. She believes in observation and proof. But now she stands alone on the deck of a rickety Chilean ship as a stark landscape reveals itself. Instead of the familiar measurable world, everything that lies ahead of her is unknown and unpredictable. Six weeks earlier her life was comfortably unfolding in an Oxford summer until her relationship was in pieces. Alice accepted an invitation to join a group working in Antarctica. James Rooker, a man on the run, has been running since his childhood in New Zealand. Now He has taken a job working on the same small Antarctic research station. The isolation wipes out everyone's past, and tension crackles in the air. But there is a jolt of recognition between Alice and Rooker that is like nothing she has ever known. And it is in Antartica that she discovers something else that will change her life forever, if she survives.