By - Michael Bravo & Nicola Triscott

Arctic Geopolitics and Autonomy is edited by Dr Michael Bravo, senior lecturer at the Scott Polar Research Institute, and Nicola Triscott, director of The Arts Catalyst. The book explores the interplay of visual culture, technology and indigenous activism in the North, and highlights the cultural, environmental and geopolitical significance of the Arctic and its indigenous people.

The book features essays by Michael Bravo, Nicola Triscott, Katarina Soukup, Lassi Heininen and David Turnbull, and is richly illustrated with colour and black and white images and photographs.

Arctic Geopolitics & Autonomy is the second publication of the Arctic Perspective Initiative (API), a project led by artists Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman, that aims to empower local citizens of the North via open and free technologies.

Published: 2010 by Hatje Cantz

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By Glyn Williams

Arctic Labyrinth tells the story of how explorers, merchants, speculators, monarchs, scientists and charlatans all became caught up in the extraordinary quest to find the Northwest Passage.

Published: 2009 by Penguin Books, London, England

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By Ken McGoogan

The untold true story of Scotsman John Rae, the Arctic adventurer who discovered the fate of Franklin and the location of the last navigable link in the Northwest Passage.

Published: 2002 by Bantam Books

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By Carol Charles

This book has been written to celebrate the life and witness of Canon Arthur Turner and the people of Pangnirtung with whom he lived. Arthur devoted his life to the Inuit of Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, Nunavut.

Published: 0 by Lavenham Press

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By Carol Charles

This book has been written to celebrate the life and witness of Canon Arthur Turner and the people of Pangnirtung with whom he lived. Arthur devoted his life to the Inuit of Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, Nunavut.

Published: 0 by Lavenham Press

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By Andrew Lambert

In 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin led a large well-equipped expedition to find the fabled North-West Passage - the route connecting the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. But Franklin, his ships and all 129 of his men never returned. Shocked by the disaster, and sickened by reports of cannibalism, the Victorians recreated Franklin as a brave Christian hero, but later generations have been more sceptical. Andrew Lambert re-examines the evidence about Franklin with brilliance and authority, discovering a new Franklin: a character far more complex, and more truly heroic, than previous histories have allowed.

Published: 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing, London

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By - Owen Beattie & John Geiger

What happened on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition of 1845-48 was one of the great maritime mysteries, until in 1981, part of a bleached human skull was found by the team working with Dr Owen Beattie. Further scientific expeditions unravelled the circumstances by which the members of Franklin's elite naval forces came within sight of the Northwest Passage, only to perish in a manner as terrible as the mind can conceive.

Published: 1987 by Bloomsbury Publishing, London

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By William Battersby

James Fitzjames was a hero of the early nineteenth-century Royal Navy. A charasmatic man with a wicked sense of humour, he pursued his naval career with wily determination. When he joined the Franklin Expedition at the age of 32 he thought he would make his name. But instead the expedition completely disappeared and he never returned. Its fate is one of history's last great unsolved mysteries, as were the origins and background of James Fitzjames - until now.

Published: 1958 by Dundurn Press

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By Sara Wheeler

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, Sara Wheeler uncovers the beautiful, brutal reality of the Arctic.

When she puts up her tent on the top of the Greenland ice sheet, she experiences climate change at the sharp (and cold) end. The Magnetic North is a spicy confection of history, science and reflection in which Wheeler meditates on the role of the Arctic in public and private. The fragmented circumpolar lands were a repository of myth long before the scientists and oilmen showed up (not to mention desperado explorers who ate their own shoes), and the hinterland north of the tree line has fed litereary imaginations from Dickens to Chekhov. The Magnetic North tells of all this, plus gulag ghosts, old and new Russia, colliding cultures and bioaccumulated toxins in polar bears.

Published: 2009 by Jonathan Cape, London, England

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By Fergus Fleming

In the mid-nineteenth century the North Pole was a mystery. Some believed that it was an island of basalt in a warm crystal sea. Explorers who tried to penetrate the real icy wastes failed or died. But after Sir John Franklin disappeared with all his men in 1845, serious efforts began to be made to find the true Northernmost point of the globe. Fergus Fleming's new book is a vivid, witty history of the disasters that ensued.

Published: 2001 by Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England

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By Peter Schmidt Mikkelsen

This book provides a history of all the wintering stations in North-East Greenland, used by trappers as well as scientists and members of the Sirius sledge patrol. The trappers, usually Danish and Norwegian, brought with them provisions for one or two years as well as a good deal of courage and endurance. The aim of the trapping was to collect the winter skins of foxes and polar bears to be sold in Europe and support the future at home. Individual trappers often wintered for several years in a row.

Published: 2008 by Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, England

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By Piers Vitebsky

A voyage of discovery into the life of a remote aboriginal community in the Siberian Arctic, where the reindeer has been a part of daily life since Palaeolithic times.

Published: 2005 by Harper Collins Publishers

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By Ann Savours

The quest for a North West Passage through the Arctic seas to China and the riches of the Orient began as long ago as the sixteenth century when northern Europeans found the southern route around the Cape of Good Hope barred by the Spanish and Portuguese. It took a further 300 years, as well as the extraordinary bravery and resilience of the explorers, for this elusive route to be finally discovered by Franklin during his famous but ill-fated voyage in the 1840s. Not until the twentieth century was the passage finally traversed by ship.

Based largely on the narratives, diaries and letters of the explorers themselves and containing illustrations never previously published, Ann Savours' work is indeed a fitting testimony to the bravery and resourcefulness of men who lived in a harder and more uncertain age than our own..

Published: 1999 by Chatham Publishing, London

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By P L Simmonds

On 18th May 1845 Sir John Franklin set sail with a crew of 134 men on two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, in an attempt to find the fabled Northwest Passage. The ships were last seen on 26 July by an Arctic whaler off the entrance to Lancaster Sound and from there they vanished, never to be seen again. A series of rescue expeditions discovered that disaster had overtaken the expedition; none of the crew made it out of the Arctic alive.

Sir John Franklin and the Arctic Regions, written six years (1852) after his disappearance, but before the final fate of him and his crew had been determined, sheds light on 19th century Arctic exploration in general and Franklin's earlier, successful expeditions, in particular, as well as providing a gripping account of the the growing unease as nothing further is heard from them.

By using letters and logs from the actual expeditions sent to discover the fate of the doomed voyage, Peter L Simmonds vividly brings to life the dangers explorers faced in the hostile conditions of the Arctic and the drive and courage of the men who were determined to discover its secrets.

Published: 2005 by Nonsuch Publishing Ltd

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By James & Sue Fenton

A personal account by a husband and wife team of their trips to Svalbard and Spitsbergen.

Published: 1997 by footprints

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By Alfred S. McLaren

A first-hand account of the historic under-ice survey of the Siberian continental shelf by USS Queenfish (SSN-651).

Published: 2008 by University of Alabama Press

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By Simon Courtauld

This extraordinary account dates from the beginning of the 1930s when Gino Watkins, still only 23, led a party of equally young men to Greenland, several of them, like himself, just down from Cambridge. Not since the 'Heroic Age' of Scott and Shackleton had a major British expedition been to the Antarctic or the Arctic.

Though undeniably fuelled by a spirit of adventure, the plan had a serious purpose: to open up the first commercial air route over the Arctic to North America, mapping the coast and mountains of east Greenland and monitoring the weather on the ice cap throughout the year. One of the party, August Courtauld (the author's uncle), spent 5 months alone at the icecap station during the winter, for the last 6 weeks buried under the snow. Others undertook sledging journeys from which they were lucky to return alive.

The structure of the book covers short biographies of Gino and 6 of his 'Boys', re-creating their relationships in Greenland and the influence the experience had on their later lives - although Gino himself was to lose his life when he returned to Greenland in 1932. By common consent his powers of leadership were remarkable. In the studio portrait of him on the book's cover, he looks an unlikely candidate for much physical inconvenience. Yet this was after a year in which the hardships and privations of the Arctic had tested him to the limit.

Published: 2010 by Michael Russell (Publishing) Ltd

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