What Edie Tells the Tourists

About this book

Every Thursday in Longyearbyen, Edie Sowerby, sixty-five, tells tourists how she survived the winter of 1978–79 alone at a trapper's hut on Svalbard, with the frozen body of the man she loved in the meat store and four months of darkness ahead of her. The town has made her its living legend. Then the dark season of 2018 brings three things at once: a council letter condemning her yellow house in the avalanche zone, a cough the hospital will not call a cold, and Signe Lund, the dead trapper's granddaughter, who has found a notebook under the floor of the hut at Gråneset. It is in Torstein's hand. It covers the winter Edie has been describing for forty years. And it does not tell her story. As the sun crawls back toward the town, Edie must decide what the truth is worth, and to whom.