The Arctic Curry Club

Dani Redd’s debut sets a contemporary novel in Longyearbyen, the remote Norwegian Arctic settlement, where the protagonist has reluctantly moved to support her husband’s research career. She is half Indian, has a complicated relationship with the family she left behind, and finds her own footing by starting a pop-up Indian restaurant in the most unlikely possible setting.

Redd actually lived in Longyearbyen for a stretch, and the place feels lived in rather than researched. The cold, the polar night, the small community of expats and locals all get specific attention.

The food is the book’s other anchor. The kitchen scenes work even for readers who don’t normally enjoy food fiction.

For readers who liked Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun or any of the books in the displaced-protagonist-finds-themselves-through-cooking subgenre, this fits the same shelf with a much colder setting. The mother-daughter strand gives the book real emotional weight.