Features
: Macmillan, paperback
"It's hell. It's heaven. It's marvellous and it cleanses your soul. It's dreadful and fills you with the sort of fear you can taste. And there is nothing on earth to compare with it..". This is the Iditarod, the longest and most dangerous race in the world, the Last Great Race. Run in March every year over a thousand miles of fierce, forbidding terrain, through the mountains and snowy wastes of Alaska where the wind whips relentlessly down from the North Pole.Natu is a young woman torn between two cultures. Fiercely protective of her ancestral land, she has instead chosen to work, with her American fiance, on the oilfields in the north. But when she hears of the death of her beloved Inupiat grandmother, she knows she must return home to her father to prepare to fulfill her dream and run the Iditarod.Against the silence and beauty of the untamed Alaskan wilderness, Danielle Thomas vividly captures the tension, fear, and elation of the race's participants, the despair and tragedy for some, and ultimately triumph for others.