The Egyptian publishing house Dawayar Publications has acquired the Arabic translation rights to Ice Shock by Elleke Boehmer, acclaimed novelist and world-renowned scholar, in a deal brokered on behalf of Karavan Press.
Dawayar Publications, established in 2023, aims to build cultural bridges through translations from multiple languages and countries, with a focus on novels, biographies, cinema, philosophy, and psychology.
Ice Shock, Boehmer’s sixth novel, is a moving love story set against a world in the grip of environmental upheaval. When Leah Nash and Niall Lawrence meet by chance and fall in love, their lives soon take them in different directions: Leah pursues her dream of becoming a writer in England, while Niall travels to a remote Antarctic research station. Separated by thousands of miles, they struggle to sustain their relationship as distance, isolation and fragile communication test their commitment. Against the haunting beauty of the melting polar landscape and a backdrop of global environmental crises, Boehmer explores the complexities of intimacy, the limits of human connection and the challenge of remaining close in a world undergoing profound change.
Originally published in South Africa by Karavan Press, Ice Shock has also been released by Valley Press in the United Kingdom.
“I am delighted that the environmental concerns highlighted through the love story portrayed in Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock are going to reach a wider, international audience at a time when we are all facing climatic challenges that expose our interconnectedness,” says Karina M. Szczurek, founder and publisher of Karavan Press.
Please contact Catrina Wessels with rights queries: catrina@catrinawessels.com.
Co-agent for Arabic rights: Mostafa Reda
About Ice Shock
The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.
Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them.
Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.
Praise for Ice Shock
“Ice Shock is a propulsive and eerie love story told frame by perilous frame. Threat lurks everywhere in the gaps, beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ real and imagined Antarctic worlds.”
— Jason Allen-Paisant, winner of the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023
“Light, of all kinds and colours, and the volatile seasonal uncertainty of our world, shapes this warm-blooded love story – and interferes disturbingly with it. A terrific, atmospheric novel that is also a study in thinking and learning how to be a writer.”
— Kirsty Gunn, author of The Boy and the Sea, Caroline’s Bikini and other novels
“Elleke Boehmer has given us a love story worth telling. The embrace of a man and a woman, separated by the distance between them – and yet so close. There is no beginning and no end, just the overpowering force of nature, the melting of the polar ice, swallowing life and the dreams of lovers.”
— Véronique Tadjo, author of In the Company of Men
“Leah and Niall meet by chance on the night bus from Edinburgh to London and fall in love. They agree to ‘give each other space’ and find themselves separated by a longitudinal parabola that stretches their commitment to breaking point … Elleke Boehmer’s lucid gaze forces the reader to imagine in a more-than-Antarctic light the lacunae of human communication, the relentless otherness of the physical world, and the sheer distance between global ‘north’ and ‘south’.”
— Terence Cave, author of Recognitions and Live Artefacts
About the author
Born in Durban, South Africa, ELLEKE BOEHMER writes fiction, history, criticism and biography. She is the author of five novels, including Screens against the Sky (shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), Bloodlines (shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize), Nile Baby and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize), and two collections of short stories. Elleke’s To the Volcano, and Other Stories was commended for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, 2019. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Other titles include Indian Arrivals (European Society for English Studies prize-winner, 2016); Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023); Stories of Women (2005); Southern Imagining (2025). Since 2008, she is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.
Links to book reviews and extracts
‘Ice Shock is a novel about passionate love in a time of climate crisis’ – A review by Rodwell Makombe
‘A reluctant, complicated love story spanning the globe and a myriad natural disasters’—Barbara Boswell reviews Ice Shock by Elleke Boehmer
‘This was the last thing she needed, and yet …’—Read an excerpt from Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock
