Finding Endurance

Published: February 2024

By Darrel Bristow-Bovey

Finding Endurance is beautiful, thrilling, heroic and kind, a ripping yarn and a generous and humane reflection on this business of being human. Claire Robertson, author of The Spiral House, winner of the 2014 Sunday Times Fiction Prize

Tender, heartfelt and lyrical. Petina Gappah, author of Out of Darkness, Shining Light

Engaging, absorbing and crammed with marvellous stories, Finding Endurance is a tale about exploring the cold, told with much warmth. Mick Herron

I was held spellbound by this recounting of one of the world's great adventure stories. But beyond the gripping polar ordeal, I was moved to the core by tender insights – into love, home, fathers and sons, and the long game of life – that emerge like veins of bright and dark water through the ice. Bristow-Bovey shares a deep knowledge of his subject with great style – and more than a touch of Shackleton's own verve and heart. An exhilarating read. Henrietta Rose-Innes, author of Green Lion

A wonderful, thoughtful account of the Endurance expedition and its fabled boss: as Darrel Bristow-Bovey points out in these pages, "We should indeed all be such failures as Shackleton." In weaving in a personal story – his father claimed to have sailed south on Endurance – Bristow-Bovey reveals ways in which "the human heart has space for opposite things". I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Sara Wheeler, travel writer and biographer

With elegiac considerations of subjects including time, hope, and ice, Finding Endurance is a grace-filled memoir about a father and a resilient Antarctic legend … complemented by beautiful elements of nature writing, biography, and the heroics of polar exploration … a tender tribute to family. Karen Rigby