From seasoned traveller and bestselling author James Raffan comes a book that will transform the way we think about northerners and the north Over the course of three years, James Raffan circumnavigated the globe at 66.6 degrees latitude: the Arctic Circle. Armed with his passion for the north, his interest in diverse cultures and his unquenchable sense of adventure, he set out to put a human face on climate change. What he discovered was by turns shocking, frustrating, entertaining and enlightening. In Circling the Midnight Sun, Raffan presents a warm-hearted, engaging portrait of the circumpolar world, but also a deeply affecting story of societies and landscapes in the throes of enormous change. Compelling and utterly original, this is both an adventure story and a book that will change your view of the north forever.

From bestselling author James Raffan comes an enlightening and original story about a polar bear’s precarious existence in the changing Arctic, reminiscent of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce. Nanurjuk, “the bear-spirited one,” is hunting for seals on Hudson Bay, where ice never lasts more than one season. For her and her young, everything is in flux. From the top of the world, Hudson Bay looks like an enormous paw print on the torso of the continent, and through a vast network of lakes and rivers, this bay connects to oceans across the globe. Here, at the heart of everything, walks Nanurjuk, or Nanu, one polar bear among the six thousand that traverse the 1.23 million square kilometers of ice and snow covering the bay. For millennia, Nanu’s ancestors have roamed this great expanse, living, evolving, and surviving alongside human beings in one of the most challenging and unforgiving habitats on earth. But that world is changing. In the Arctic’s lands and waters, oil has been extracted—and spilled. As global temperatures have risen, the sea ice that Nanu and her young need to hunt seal and fish has melted, forcing them to wait on land where the delicate balance between them and their two-legged neighbors has now shifted. This is the icescape that author and geographer James Raffan invites us to inhabit in Ice Walker. In precise and provocative prose, he brings readers inside Nanu’s world as she treks uncertainly around the heart of Hudson Bay, searching for nourishment for the children that grow inside her. She stops at nothing to protect her cubs from the dangers she can see—other bears, wolves, whales, human beings—and those she cannot. By focusing his lens on this bear family, Raffan closes the gap between humans and bears, showing us how, like the water of the Hudson Bay, our existence—and our future—is tied to Nanu’s. He asks us to consider what might be done about this fragile world before it is gone for good. Masterful, vivid, and haunting, Ice Walker is an utterly unique piece of creative nonfiction and a deeply affecting call to action.

Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her. Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.

Circling Brooks is a work of social and natural historical fiction, magic realism and zoomorphism, which depicts modern human society in the wilderness. In addition to narrating entertaining adventures, it questions stereotypic and personified descriptions of the landscape. Rather than merely recount human-projected thoughts and designs upon the earth, the book portrays the land shaping and, in somewhat wild form(s), literally transforming humans. It plays with the multifarious possibilities of the unleashed power of the land upon humanity. The novel is an account of many inter-linking journeys in the rough style of the epic. The nexus of all action is the re-invented village of “Brooks,” located on the north coast of Alaska between Barrow and Point Hope. From Brooks the characters wander across north central Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and eastern Siberia. Their paths wind south; cross, combine, split, and eventually curve back north to complete a mosaic of circling trails. Along the way these protagonists meet with many wild incidents and side-characters, including surly bears with grudges, an enraged cuckold, ghosts of dead caribou, projected vision through animal eyes, a maniacal captain of an illegal whaling ship, racist cult-missionaries, a whining phantom of a dead snowshoe hare, and their own persistent dreams.

Take the Next Step... Clear away the outdated clutter that has obscured the power and beauty of the Golden Dawn magical system and feel for yourself the difference these techniques can make in your life. Explore dozens of new rituals developed from the fragments and core documents of the greatest Magical Order in the Western world. Step out of the darkness and into the light of understanding.John Michael Greer writes in a lucid and entertaining manner, revealing previously unknown aspects of the magical rites of the Golden Dawn. Warm and engaging, Circles of Power revitalizes Western magic by removing the unnecessary rhetoric and obscure jargon. Everything is plainly and simply explained and all the information you need to begin working within this magical system is presented in a clear and concise manner. Filled with the fruits of personal experience and insights derived from in-depth research, Circles of Power is the next best thing to actually joining a Hermetic lodge.

Canadian politicians, like many of their circumpolar counterparts, brag about their country’s “Arctic identity” or “northern character,” but what do they mean, exactly? Stereotypes abound, from Dudley Do-Right to Northern Exposure, but these southern perspectives fail to capture northern realities. In this passionate, deeply personal account of modern developments in the Canadian North, Tony Penikett corrects confused and outdated notions of a region he became fascinated with as a child and for many years called home. During decades of service as a legislator, mediator, and negotiator, Penikett bore witness to the advent of a new northern consciousness. Out of sight of New Yorkers, and far from the minds of Copenhagen’s citizens, Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders came together to forge new Arctic realities as they dealt with the challenges of the Cold War, climate change, land rights struggles, and the boom and bust of resource megaprojects. This lively account of their clashes and accommodations not only retraces the footsteps of Penikett’s personal hunt for a northern identity but also tells the story of an Arctic that the world does not yet know.

A self-proclaimed “vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial,” poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers. The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century—a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics. Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind. “It takes all of us seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling to be one,” she says, embodying these words in her work. Every sense is amplified as the poems, carefully arranged, pull the reader into their worlds. While each poem stands on its own, they flow together throughout the collection into a single cohesive body. The book quickly sets up its own rhythms, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes, dark and light, and other spaces both ecological and spiritual. These narrative, and often visionary, poems let the lives of animal species and the power of natural processes weave into the human psyche, and vice versa. Okpik’s descriptive rhythms ground the reader in movement and music that transcend everyday logic and open up our hearts to the richness of meaning available in the interior and exterior worlds.