White Road

Only one knows the truth. Only one can reveal it. Only one can save them all.
"A gripping, page-turning eco-thriller, part oil rig drama and part survival story. The worlds of the oil industry and the Arctic are convincingly rendered."
-- Kevan Manwaring, author/editor of Writing Eco-Fiction and Heavy Weather
"An intelligent, urgent, white-knuckle ride through the brutal Canadian Arctic, this is a novel that will get you thinking, keep you guessing - and leave you reeling. Whitehead's vivid depiction of the hazards of ruthless extractivism couldn't be more timely - and if there's a Nerves of Steel Award, its heroine, Carrie Essler, would win it hands down."
-- Liz Jensen, bestselling author of The Rapture and The Uninvited
"A page-turning disaster drama, White Road is also a moral re-examination of the climate crisis and our species' relentless need for more hydrocarbons. The author attends to the hour-by-hour twists in his plot, yet spliced to a forensic exploration of the human heart. He gives us a love letter to the extraordinary ice world of the Arctic: both its fragile beauty and its remorseless terrors. Before everything, the book strikes me as a singular, beautifully integrated achievement."
-- Mark Cocker, naturalist and author of One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth
Carrie, a Scottish rescue swimmer out of her depth in the High Arctic. Ross, the owner of an oil rig with a guilty conscience. Amaruq, an Inuvialuit oil-rig worker caught between two worlds.
Stranded on the Arctic ice with a starving polar bear and a half-dead stranger, Carrie's left with nothing but deadly choices. Ross and Amaruq face their own crossroads. Lives hang on their decisions.
From the cruel Arctic to the corporate backrooms of shady Big Oil, White Road is an authentic and gripping eco-thriller of survival, battled out at the edge of everything.

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester, where he also directs the annual free lit-fest, Literary Leicester. His first novel The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin) was called 'powerful, brave, ambitious' (The Globe & Mail), 'a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive' (Quill & Quire), 'a thriller with a Joseph Conradian plot' (The Walrus). He's published short stories, reviews, essays and more in a wide variety of genres. He used to work in the film business and, before that, lived in the Far East.