These unpredictable short stories explore themes of heat and cold, ice and glaciers in the heat of the South Pacific, and take us into unusual lives and situations. 

A woman is caught between traditional ways and the regime of a military dictatorship; a glaciology researcher falls into a crevasse and confronts the unexpected; two women lose children in freak shooting accidents; a child in a Barbie Doll sweatshop dreams of a different life; school girls struggle with secrets about an addicted janitor; and two women take a deathly trip through a glacier melt stream.

Gina Cole is of Fijian, Scottish and Welsh descent. She is a freelance writer and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her collection Black Ice Matter won the Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book Fiction at the 2017 Ockham Book Awards. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in literary journals. She was the inaugural Pasifika curator at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021. She is a qualified lawyer. She holds a PhD in creative writing from Massey University and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa.