At the center of this multifaceted adventure novel is the fate of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition, the Payer-Weyprecht expedition, which set out in the Arctic summer of 1872 into the unexplored sea northeast of the Siberian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The expedition ship is soon - and forever - trapped in pack ice. After more than a year of drifting through all the horrors of ice and darkness, the scurvy-stricken crew discovers a group of islands buried beneath glaciers at the edge of the world and names it Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Land in honor of a distant ruler. One of the last blind spots has thus been erased from the map of the Old World. Parallel to the drama of this historical expedition, Ransmayr tells the story of a young Italian named Mazzini, who lives in Vienna and becomes obsessed more than a hundred years later.