The Guardian newspaper included it among the top five books launched on the UK market this year.
The daily’s critic Adam Roberts describes Ice as "a marvellous ice-palace of a novel; capacious, packed with invention and incident, set in a baroquely detailed world with a brilliantly chilly atmosphere, and featuring stimulating metaphysical exposition and kinetic and thrilling set pieces."
The Guardian adds: "What a giant of a book it is: 1,200 pages of alternative history in which a mysterious alien incursion during the Tunguska event – the asteroid impact that hit Siberia in 1908 with a force about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – has changed the direction of history."
The New Scientist magazine recommends Dukaj’s Ice as follows: "If you are interested in an important and wildly inventive work of sci-fi and unafraid of a long and challenging read, this might be for you."
The Daily Mail writes: "Mighty, relentless, unhurried, this extraordinary work by the much-garlanded Polish author is glacial – in the best way. It dazzles and grips as it carves out a new world of science, history and pure imagination."
The book was published by Bloomsbury, in a translation by Ursula Phillips.
The story opens on July 14, 1924, in Warsaw—then under Russian rule—where a young Polish mathematician is awakened in the middle of the night by officials from the Ministry of Winter.
He is sent on the Trans-Siberian Express to search for his long-exiled father.
First published in Poland in 2007, Ice won Dukaj the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009.
Dukaj's works have been translated into 19 languages.
Jacek Dukai. Photo: PAP/Jakub Kaczmarczyk
A short animated movie by Tomasz Bagiński based on Dukaj’s novella Katedra (The Cathedral) was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003.
In 2020, Netflix released the Into the Night series based on his novel Starość aksolotla (The Old Axolotl).
Image: Materiały promocyjne/Publicity handout for the book Starość aksolotla (The Old Axolotl)
(mk/gs)