Even if you can't stand exploration literature, you couldn't fail to be moved by Lansing's image of Ernest Shackleton standing in the snow, tearing Chapter 38 from the book of Job - "Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath engendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen . . . " - before abandoning his Bible to the blizzard. First published in 1959, Endurance is packed with such movie-star moments, and Tim Pigott-Smith recreates Shackleton's astonishing trek over savage pack ice, monstrous waves and uncharted peaks with just the right air of "boy's own" insouciance. Gripping? You'll be hanging on by your fingernails.
