Ice plays a major role in Joan Clark’s novel Latitudes of Melt,

Ice delivers Aurora from the frigid North Atlantic to her new family in Newfoundland. Ice becomes her son Stan’s career. The huge icebergs that break off the earth’s polar regions and float off the shore of Newfoundland sink ships but are beautiful to swim around. Ice gives the book its title, referring to the latitudes at which icebergs melt.

“Because Newfoundland was roughly between 46 and 51 degrees north, it was smack in the middle of the latitudes of melt.”

Using a touch of magical realism, Joan Clark recounts the life of fictional characters living in very real places in this remotest of Canada’s provinces.

Cape Race is a point of land located at the southeastern tip of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. Dense fogs, rocky coasts, and its proximity to trans-Atlantic shipping routes have resulted in many shipwrecks near Cape Race over the years and Aurora’s life as the Cape Race lighthouse keeper’s wife is the center of this fine novel.

Aurora is found floating on an ice flow the day after the Titanic sinks in 1912 but, although the reader knows her history, it does not become known to Aurora & her family until Aurora is elderly.

What is known is the story of Aurora’s family, growing up on this rocky shore and each leaving to pursue relationships and careers. The novel covers the years between 1912 and the end of Aurora’s long life seamlessly. The flashbacks to her mother’s journey are not as deftly drawn but in some ways that was beneficial. By the time Aurora’s granddaughter traces her past, it seems vaguely unreal, as the past before one’s own birth often does.

Although not as brutal as Michael Crummey’s Galore, Latitudes is another excellent novel to fill in the history of Newfoundland. I recommend it at a solid 4 of five stars.

This is a stop on the Literary Road Trip.


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