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Ice Shock: A Love Story

Ice Shock: A Love Story

Elleke Boehmer

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Hardback (with dust jacket)

Pre-order now: for delivery December 2025

The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.

Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them. Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.

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Imprint: Valley Press

Published: 2026

ISBN: 9781915606709

Catalogue no: VP0257

Page count: 276

Trim size: 229 x 152 mm

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Praise for Ice Shock: A Love Story:

"Ice Shock is a propulsive and eerie love story told frame by perilous frame. Threat lurks everywhere in the gaps, beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ real and imagined Antarctic worlds."
— Jason Allen-Paisant, winner of the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023

"Light, of all kinds and colours, and the volatile seasonal uncertainty of our world, shapes this warm-blooded love story – and interferes disturbingly with it. A terrific, atmospheric novel that is also a study in thinking and learning how to be a writer."
— Kirsty Gunn, author of The Boy and the Sea, Caroline’s Bikini and other novels

"Elleke Boehmer has given us a love story worth telling. The embrace of a man and a woman, separated by the distance between them – and yet so close. There is no beginning and no end, just the overpowering force of nature, the melting of the polar ice, swallowing life and the dreams of lovers."
— Véronique Tadjo, author of In the Company of Men

"Leah and Niall meet by chance on the night bus from Edinburgh to London and fall in love. They agree to ‘give each other space’ and find themselves separated by a longitudinal parabola that stretches their commitment to breaking point … Elleke Boehmer’s lucid gaze forces the reader to imagine in a more-than-Antarctic light the lacunae of human communication, the relentless otherness of the physical world, and the sheer distance between global ‘north’ and ‘south’."
— Terence Cave, author of Recognitions and Live Artefacts

About the author

Born in Durban, South Africa, Elleke Boehmer writes fiction, history, criticism and biography. She is the author of five novels, including Screens against the Sky (shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), Bloodlines (shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize), Nile Baby and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize), as well as two collections of short stories. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Since 2008, she is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.