Ice

A novel of hauntings, love, longing, memory and loss told with audacity and breathtaking imaginative power from one of Australia's most acclaimed writers.

You have possessed me, let me go.

An iceberg is towed through the Heads to the astonishment of colonial Sydney. As it melts, the iceberg is revealed as a tomb to the perfectly preserved body of a young sailor, who died forty years before.A man lost in gried for his wife is haunted by his memories of her. His life becomes a memorial to her, in the hope of defeating the oblivion of death.

Ice tells the story of Malcolm McEacharn, the man who brings joy to early Sydney in the form of an iceberg and who later pioneers the first successful refrigerated voyage from Australia to London.

• Miles Franklin Literary Award

  2009

  Shortlist