Nevil Shute · 1940 · survival

Nevil Shute's 1940 novel. An out-of-work pilot is hired by an Oxford don to fly him and his daughter to Greenland in a single-engined seaplane, to photograph the Norse settlement at Brattalid from the air. Most of the book is the sheer logistical labour of getting there - moorings, fuel dumps, weather - and then, at the site, it turns into something else entirely.

1. 1
   Southampton

   Donald Ross, a Scottish pilot with bush-flying experience in Canada and no work, takes a job from Professor Lockwood and begins the enormous business of fitting out a seaplane on Southampton Water for an Arctic survey.

2. 2
   Invergordon

   The first hop north is to Invergordon on the Cromarty Firth, the last real base in Britain - fuel, a mooring and a weather report, and after that a crossing that very few aircraft of the period had survived.

3. 3
   Reykjavik

   They cross to Iceland and lie at Reykjavik waiting on the weather, while Ross works over the engine and the wireless and tries to make his passengers understand how narrow the margins on the next leg actually are.

4. 4
   Julianehaab

   Over the pack ice to the Greenland coast and the Danish settlement at Julianehaab, where the supporting stores have been shipped ahead and the local people are frank about what they think of camping at the old Norse site.

5. 5
   Brattalid

   At Brattalid, Erik the Red's farm in the fjord, the survey is flown and the camp made - and Ross, exhausted and drugged with sleeping tablets, dreams a voyage west with Leif Ericson, and wakes able to find a runestone by it.