The Explorer's Daughter

Book excerpt: For the first two years of her life Kari Herbert lived with her mother and father, the explorer Sir Wally Herbert, among the Inuit people in the vast snowy wastes of the High Arctic. Her first words were Inuktun, her first friends the children of hunters and the pull of the place and its people lured the family back several times during her childhood. Then in 2002 she returned to the Arctic alone. She met her childhood friends again, remembered the exhilaration of sledging with dogs across the ice and remembered the language and faces of her early years. She also encountered alarming changes: the uneasy coexistence of modern life and ancient traditions, and of the hopes and tragedy at the heart of this extraordinary and yet deeply familiar community. place of family memories and of savage beauty, where her friends still hunt and eat whale meat; and where she rediscovers a compelling world where light and darkness dominate life.