The Blue Hours

A sweeping memoir of life in Antarctica, and pushing past the boundaries of the known world and your own limits.

Humans have romanticized Antarctica for centuries. To Stephanie Krzywonos, Antarctica, and its well-known tragedies and hidden histories, are places to search for answers and belonging—and something larger than herself.

Hungry for the sublime and haunted over her best friend’s tragic death, Stephanie leaves her entire life behind to live in Antarctica as an ordinary worker and tests the limits of survival.

Over six polar summers and one astonishing winter, she encounters adorable penguins, colossal glaciers, and whiteout storms. In old explorers’ huts, the traces of ghosts show the extremes to which people are willing to go to find peace. In this rare account of an Antarctic winter, the sun disappears for over four months, and Stephanie reckons with Antarctica’s complicated past alongside her own grief and desire to live—all while auroras, the moon, sunrise, and darkness itself nourish her. Throughout, Stephanie also traces the stories of female, queer, and BIPOC explorers often left out of the annals of Antarctic history to ask: Who truly belongs in Antarctica, a place that has come to symbolize despair and hope in a rapidly warming planet? And in a wounded world filled with so much loss, is healing even possible?

An exquisite blend of memoir, history, criticism, and science, The Blue Hours illuminates hidden histories of life on “the Ice” and gives voice to the natives—seals and whales, ice and rock—that make up the extraordinary body of Antarctica herself.