Lean Fall Stand
JON McGREGOR
(FOURTH ESTATE, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

In 2004, two years after the publication of his first novel, the highly lauded If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor travelled to Antarctica as part of the British Antarctic Survey’s Artists and Writers Programme. Seventeen years, three novels and two short-story collections later, he revisits this gripping setting to riveting effect in Lean Fall Stand.

The first section starts dramatically and continues in a style as tense and spare as the landscape. We’re dropped straight into the catastrophe which unfolds as two young expedition scientists – Thomas and Luke – are caught in a storm, under the supposedly expert care of Robert “Doc” Wright. They should be in safe hands with this veteran of Antarctic fieldwork, but it quickly becomes clear that Doc’s flaws may be their undoing. As the storm builds and their thinking becomes more confused, the younger men try to “remember the plan”. As panic sets in, they recall Doc “had mentioned several times that he didn’t do everything by the book” and he often “started drinking pretty early in the day”. The reader’s alarm begins to mount.