Frostlines by Neil Shea is a work of nonfiction subtitled A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic. Shea writes a series of chapters with each on his time in an area north of the Arctic Circle.
He writes of the Northwest Passage, and how forty-one ships made the voyage through the Passage in 2023 and thirty-eight in 2024. Covered in one chapter is the decline in caribou herds across the top of North America. In another, he shows a classroom in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, where a freshly killed caribou is butchered for the students to see, and the parts all parceled out to the Nunamiut people.
Shea as well covers Greenland and the Norse people who vanished from there in the mid-fifteenth century. The last chapter is on the border between Russia and Norway, stretching 120 miles, stopping at the Barents Sea. He writes about the Norwegian town of Kirkenes and how people used to cross the border in both directions, but now after the invasion of Crimea, then Covid-19, then the invasion of Ukraine, traffic has largely stopped.
