Alaska turns everything on its head. America’s largest, emptiest state resists attempts to pin it down – and those who do attempt it tend to find their gaze being forced inwards instead. “I looked directly into its eyes,” wrote anthropologist Richard K. Nelson of his encounter with an Alaskan wolverine, “and knew that I understood nothing.”

The Snow Child, the debut novel by Eowyn Ivey, a one-time reporter on the Frontiersman newspaper, was an explor­ation of this unsettling topsy-turvyness. In To The Bright Edge of the World she continues pulling on the thread, conjuring a land where nothing is quite what it seems. For her, Alaska is a metaphysical crossing place where the normal boundaries – between people and animals, waking and sleeping, the living and the dead – melt away like snow.