Arctic Summer - Galgut

On December 19, 1910, a few months after the publication of Howards End, EM Forster began sketching out the plan for a new novel. This book, he wrote in his diary, would contain “no love making – at least not of the orthodox kind, & perhaps not even the unorthodox… My motive should be democratic affection.” He never completed the novel, though he did come up with a title, Arctic Summer, which he defined as “the long cold day in which there is time to do things”.

In his own novel of the same name, Damon Galgut reconstructs the arctic summer of Forster’s long fictional silence, which lasted from 1910 until the publication of A Passage to India in 1924. Apparently unable to write, or at any rate finish a book, Forster did indeed have “time to do things” – chiefly travel – and the subsequent period of geographical and emotional exploration was crucial to the development of both his work and his character.

Taken from The Telegraph