These are the questions that decide who has what it takes to live at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54 DegreesF and no sunlight for six months a year. Cooper Gosling has just answered five hundred of them. Her results indicate she is strange enough for Polar life. Cooper's not sure if this is an achievement, but she knows she has nothing to lose. Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, she's adrift at thirty and - despite her early promise as a painter - on the verge of sinking her career. So she accepts her place in the National Science Foundation's Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica - where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own.

Ashley Shelby's comedy of errors, South Pole Station, is 'a portrait painted with the whole palette - science and politics; art and history; love and frostbite - and all of it crackles with the can't-make-this-up details of life at the bottom of the world' (Robin Sloan).