Stef Penney’s Under a Pole Star is shortlisted in the Costa Awards novel category, and is the work of an assured author who has proved herself at her finest in the drama and beauty of a snowscape (her first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, won the Costa prize more than a decade ago).

Flora MacKie is an arctic explorer in the 1890s – a time when women just didn’t do that sort of thing – and she battles every obstacle, from prejudice, to ice and isolation, to spend time in her beloved frozen north.

It is in these bleak surroundings that she makes the connections that will shape her life. First, with the local eskimo people who become lifelong friends, then the captivating Jakob de Beyn and the dangerously driven Lester Armitage, explorers whose fates are shaped, like hers, by arctic winds.

At the outset of the book, Flora is an elderly lady returning to the pole for a publicity event, and she is harried by a young journalist who wants to uncover the secrets of her past. “They’re all dead, except me,” she says. “What does it matter now?”

It matters very much to the journalist, and his persistence leads Flora to retell, and reconsider, her story – and it will send a shiver down your spine.

Under a Pole Star, by Stef Penney (Quercus £7.99)