Skating to Antarctica [Paperback]

'Jenny Diski's new book has the gripping dream-like logic of a fairy story...Even better, it's a true story...I savoured her clarity, the clipped, astringent truthfulness of her prose, the ice-and-lemon of her universal agnosticism.' Maggie Gee, Literary Review ** 'This is her best and most moving book to date...sassy and vulnerable...Diski puts all her novelistic skills at the service of discovering and arranging autobiographical truth.' Michele Roberts, The Times 'Skating to Antarctica is a fascinating, moving account of two voyages...Diski's book shines out for its wit, lack of self- pity and strong interest in survival. I relished her sketches of ship routine, solemn penguins and bored soldiers...Diski has a great sense of the absurd, whether she is writing about her conman father or the sexual antics of an elephant seal. Antarctica is not barren after all.' - Helen Dunmore, Express 'A non-fiction masterpiece.' - She 'This extraordinary account of a journey to the most barren outer reaches of the planet becomes a beautiful, complex symbol: it's a voyage of self-discovery to the white emptiness that is painted as truth, despair, calm and madness - all at once.' - Good Housekeeping 'There are not many novelists who would make a serious request to be a writer in residence in the Antarctic. But then there are not many novelists like Jenny Diski.' - Observer Review 'The conjunction between Antarctica and her past is predicated on a notion of emptiness...The symbol becomes so powerful that Diski, like Pynchon before her, finally uses a lower-case 'a': that place without pain is antarctic...Skating to Antarctica is both fragmentary memoir and sketchy travelogue. Together they tell the shadowy story of an inner journey form darkness to light. It is an inconclusive trip, but then all the best ones are.' - Daily Telegraph 'An original and striking memoir, cool but authentic, filled with emotional imagery and insight that is all the more resonant for its restraint.' - Independent on Sunday 'Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica, part traveller's tale, part autobiography, tells the story of a trip to Antarctica, interwoven with reminiscences of her dysfunctional family and daughter's quest to find what became of Diski's own long-lost mother. There are great descriptions of penguins and elephant seals and Diski's fellow travellers, and a gripping account of Diski's amazingly awful parents. Keeps you appalled and enthralled.' - Observer '... unfailingly sharp-edged prose, confession with its wit about it.' - Times Literary Supplement. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

'Her best and most moving book to date … sassy and vulnerable' --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

'There are not many novelists like Jenny Diski' --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

'unfailingly sharp-edged prose, confession with its wit about it' --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This travel journal traces a personal journey to Antarctica. For over 30 years Jenny Diski was content to leave the question as to whether her mother was alive or dead unanswered. Not knowing the fate of the violent woman she last saw shortly after her father's death in 1966 filled her with a sense of relief rather than of loss. Then, just as Diski is planning a trip to the dream world of ice, her own teenage daughter decides to investigate what had happened to her crazy, missing maternal grandmother. Diski's unexamined desire to travel to the whiteness of Antarctica becomes a more complicated journey than she expected as cabin 532 of the Russian-crewed ship takes her further than just the world of icebergs. She also voyages back into the faded landscape and closed-off world of her childhood - to her distraught mother, her conman of a father and a child called Jennifer. Her mother had taken Jennifer ice skating from the age of two, hoping for an ice princess as a daughter. What she got was something icier. Jenny Diski is the author of "Nothing Natural", "Rainforest", "Like Mother", "Then Again", Happily Ever After", "Monkey's Uncle" and "The Dream Mistress, as well as a collection of short stories called "The Vanishing Princess".

"Funny, stinging....Pairing an Outward Bound excursion with memoir's traditional self-examination creates a surprising hybrid of the two genres. In Diski's hands, it makes for a better mousetrap indeed."

-Maria Flook, New york Times Book Review

"Brilliant, hilarious, and deeply disturbing....What makes her book so unusual is the graceful acuity with which she writes and the quality of her mind: its intelligence and humour-a kind of springy, buoyant inventiveness."

-Francine Prose, Elle

"A soaring fusion of personal memoir and travelogue... as bracing and wild as any polar adventure. 'A'."

-Entertainment Weekly --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Jenny Diski is the author of eight novels and two memoirs: SKATING TO ANTARCTICA and STRANGER ON A TRAIN. She lives in Cambridge. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.