The Age of Ice

Set initially in Russia during the reign of Empress Anna Ioanovna in the 1740s, J.M. Sidorova’s The Age of Ice turns on a single premise: Alexander Velitsyn, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, is born immune to cold. What’s more, all those emotions that inflame others—passion, rage, shame, etc.—cause him, instead, to generate cold to an equal intensity.…