A wry beguiling portrait of a Montreal schoolteacher who exchanges one solitude for another, leaving her home to teach for a year in a Francophone school in Iqaluit only to find herself drawn into a fractious relationship with the constable uncle of one of her students. Mihali’s depiction of the northern city and the forbidding landscape surrounding it is frank and unsentimental, as is her portrayal of lonely people at the edge of the continent striving to understand each other, and themselves, with six months of icy darkness unfolding around them.

Felicia Mihali’s prose is at once lean and economical, but also razor-sharp in its depiction of the life of an outsider.