The White Darkness

I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and the age difference won't matter.

Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears.

But Sym's uncle Victor is even more obsessed—and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.

In her first contemporary young adult novel, Carnegie Medalist and three-time Whitbread Award winner Geraldine McCaughrean delivers a spellbinding journey into the frozen heart of darkness.

Geraldine McCaughrean is the winner of England's most prestigious children's book award, the Carnegie Medal, for A Pack of Lies. She is the first-ever three-time winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award, most recently for Not the End of the World, which is also a School Library Journal Best Book and was named an Outstanding International Book by the United States Board on Books for Young People/Children's Book Council. The White Darkness was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. Her other recent books include The Stones Are Hatching; The Kite Rider, an ALA Notable Children's Book, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and a NestlÉ Smarties Book Prize Bronze Medal winner, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal; and Stop the Train!, an ALA Notable Children's Book, recipient of a Highly Commended Carnegie Medal Citation, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books, and a Parent's Guide to Children's Media Award winner. Ms. McCaughrean lives in Berkshire, England.