Snow Widows

In the middle of a moonless night in 1913, the Terra Nova steams silently into Oamaru harbour in New Zealand. The men aboard have a desperate mission - they must reach the relatives of Scott's South Pole expedition before the morning papers break the news that the whole party have perished.

Robert Falcon Scott and the men of his polar expedition were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the empire they served. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothers.

Now for the first time, and with unprecedented access to family archives, Katherine MacInnes retells the story of the race for the South Pole from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it, five women who offer a window into a lost age.

In a remarkable feat of historical reconstruction and with a gripping narrative voice, Katherine MacInnes vividly depicts the lives, loves and losses of five women forced into the public eye by tragedy and shaped by the unrelenting culture of empire.