Remember a few weeks short ago I featured as my Daily Bookshot, a beautiful cover from Telegram Books? Well here’s another one, which only goes to show that Telegram are habitual in their design of exquisite book covers.
The artwork featured on the cover for this novel – A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu, is the work of Swedish artist Georg von Rosen, who painted this portrait of intrepid Finnish arctic explorer, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in 1886.
Von Rosen would have undoubtedly never envisaged such a use for his amazing painting, but one skim of the novel’s synopsis confirms it to be the most perfect piece of artwork for this novel’s cover:
When ice traps John MacLennan’s ship in the Bering Strait in 1910, the youthful sailor blows up his hands trying to widen a small fissure with dynamite.
Local Chukchi men take him by dogsled to a medicine woman, but gangrene sets in and John’s hands have to be amputated. Then strong winds break the ice shelf and his ship sails off without him …
John gradually adapts to his handicap, adopting Chukchi ways and finding friendship, and love, among his hosts. Even his role in the tragic, accidental death of his best friend pulls him deeper into the community’s folds.
A remarkable tale of resilience and reconciliation set in one of the most majestic and inhospitable environments on earth.
Telegram Books | February 2008 (UK) | £8.99 | PAPERBACK | 337 PP | ISBN: 9781846590405
About Rob
I’ve been wanting to read this for a while, but just haven’t got round to it, what with all the other books I want to read it. Last year was a bad year for Russian writers, what with Solzhenitsyn dying, capping off a year that had saw Yuri Rytkheu pass a month before another author published by Telegram, Chingiz Aitmatov.