The Patience of Ice

He came to Alaska looking for distance. What he found was nowhere left to hide.

When a teaching job takes Elias Vane from Florida to a remote village in Western Alaska, he tells himself he has come north for work, for change, perhaps even for a chance to begin again. But Elias has brought more with him than winter clothes and unfinished ambitions.

His wife, Camila, is thousands of miles away in Colombia, building a future that increasingly seems capable of existing without him. His daughter, Elena, is in Alabama, carrying the consequences of a father whose intentions have too often arrived before his actions. And in Nunavek, among students and colleagues who have watched outsiders arrive with good intentions and leave again, Elias discovers that being useful is not the same as belonging.

As the river freezes and the darkness deepens, an unexpected intimacy begins testing the boundaries of the life he has tried so carefully to preserve. What follows forces Elias to confront the stories he tells about love, loyalty, fatherhood, desire, and the difference between endurance and wisdom.

Set against the frozen rivers, changing light, and close-knit village life of Western Alaska, The Patience of Ice is a psychologically searching literary novel about marriage, estrangement, midlife reinvention, cultural distance, and moral consequence-and about what happens when a man travels thousands of miles only to discover that distance cannot protect him from himself.

Because some places do not change us. They simply make it impossible to keep looking away.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W.E.Jackson Publishing
Published: 10/13/2026
ISBN: 9798952456105
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.56d