White Road

Only one knows the truth. Only one can reveal it. Only one can save them all.

Carrie Essler is an ex-British-Navy rescue swimmer, now working for the Canadian Coast Guard. Transferred to the remote outpost of Tuktoyaktuk after a bitter break-up, she finds herself in dire peril when an oil rig explodes in the Beaufort Sea. Carrie is presumed dead–though in fact she is stranded on a small boat in a nightmarish landscape of oil-laced ice. With her is a dying man, a paralysed stranger she must try to save, and find a way back to civilisation for them both.

What caused the explosion: accident or environmental terrorism? The injured man holds the answers, but he’s not talking. Jim Ross, Carrie’s only friend in the region and the stricken rig’s corporate director, is wrestling with both the catastrophic aftermath and his own guilty secrets. But it is only Ross who believes–against all evidence–that Carrie is alive.

As the oil spill spreads beneath the ice, Ross battles to mount a rescue mission to find Carrie. But is his obsession merely a way to try to assuage his own terrible culpability?

"An intelligent, urgent, white-knuckle ride through the brutal Canadian Arctic, this is a novel that will get you thinking, keep you guessing - and leave you reeling. Whitehead's vivid depiction of the hazards of ruthless extractivism couldn't be more timely - and if there's a Nerves of Steel Award, its heroine, Carrie Essler, would win it hands down."

— Liz Jensen, bestselling author of The Rapture and The Uninvited

"A page-turning disaster drama, White Road is also a moral re-examination of the climate crisis and our species' relentless need for more hydrocarbons. The author attends to the hour-by-hour twists in his plot, yet spliced to a forensic exploration of the human heart. He gives us a love letter to the extraordinary ice world of the Arctic: both its fragile beauty and its remorseless terrors. Before everything, the book strikes me as a singular, beautifully integrated achievement."

— Mark Cocker, naturalist and author of One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth