This is a book about the amazing journey of people discovering the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, looking for traces of a small historical event against the backdrop of the ending of the Soviet Union.

At the start of the age of exploration, the North Pole was believed to be hiding a continent, a land mass warmed by the midnight sun still inspiring today’s ‘Lost World’ fantasies. In the summer of 1596, two ships departed from Amsterdam to sail by its shores. The nine-month struggle for ...