An evening with Giles Milton

One man's lust for empire sent a team of adventurers into the Arctic - only one came back.

1913, the Arctic Circle. Charismatic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson is obsessed with a frozen speck of land in the Siberian Arctic: Wrangel Island. Believing that whoever possesses it will control the future - air routes, resources, even the balance of power in the northern hemisphere, he takes an impossible gamble. Dispatching a small, ill-equipped venture to stake a frozen colony in Britain's name, it is a triumph of brilliance, ego and breathtaking hubris.

What follows is a catastrophe of starvation, madness and geopolitical jeopardy. As winter seals the island in ice, relief ships fail to arrive and tensions among the colonists spiral toward despair. While diplomats spar and warships steam north, the settlers are left to endure scurvy, polar bears, and the terror of abandonment. At the centre of it all stands one unlikely survivor - a young Inuit seamstress who miraculously outlasts them all . . .

Sweeping, chilling and stranger than fiction, Empire at the Edge of the World is a true story of greed and justice at the edge of the world.