Edward Hancox

Iceland, Defrosted is the story of one man's love affair with a beguiling little island in the middle of the Atlantic. It is not a travel story, or a guide, or any number of other things readers might mistakenly guess based on where it sits in a bookstore. Marco Polo didn't simply visit the far East. Sir Hillary didn't simply climb Everest. Like many before him, great and small, Edward Hancox experiences a deep connection to a place that is so profound it borders on ineffable.

The magic of the book is in Mr. Hancox ability to share that penetrating allure with his readers. If you are already an Icelandophile then his anecdotes will sound familiar even if you have never traveled. That familiarity is the undercurrent, or theme, that glues everything into a cohesive story. No, it's not his endless search for the Aurora Borealis or magnificent puffin photography, it is love. It is, as the British poet John Betjeman would have named it, Topophilia at its purest.

It would be a waste of effort to comment on any specific story or review his use of language in this review. I must review the book for how well it performs as what it is. In that sense, I must say it was fantastic.

4/5 on the Goodreads scale, 5/5 on the Amazon scale.… (mere)