South Pole Station
(Book)

"Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty, unmoored by a family tragedy and floundering in her career as a painter. So she applies to the National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica--the bottom of the Earth--where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. There's Pearl, the cook whose Carrot Mushroom Loaf becomes a means toward her Machiavellian ambitions; the oxymoronic Sal (he is an attractive astrophysicist); and Tucker, the only gay black man on the continent who, as station manager, casts a watchful eye on all. The only thing they have in common is the conviction that they don't belong anywhere else. Enter Frank Pavano--a climatologist with unorthodox beliefs. His presence will rattle this already unbalanced community, bringing Cooper and the Polies to the center of a global controversy and threatening the 800-million-year-old ice chip they call home."--