The Polar Bear Protocol
A novel of slow-burning suspense about vulnerability in a melting Arctic
Eira travels to a research village on Svalbard for a writer's residency. A handful of wooden buildings at the edge of the inhabited world. Her housemates, a group of biologists, joke that it would make the perfect setting for a murder mystery. But that is exactly the story Eira does not want to write.
As she tries to find her place among the scientists and long-term residents, the fragile calm of the village breaks. During a costume party, a polar bear is shot dead, and no one admits to firing. Not long after, the shooting instructor Jesper is found frozen to death in the shed behind Eira's house. The police rule it an accident and the community moves on. Eira is not so sure.
Between Eira's chapters, the house itself speaks, in the first person plural, of its inhabitants, its rot and its slow decay. Serné writes with sensory precision and a sharp eye for the grotesque side of life in an isolated community. Nature, history and myth sit alongside a constant undercurrent of menace that never settles into a classic thriller plot. Like the melting landscape, the tension stays unresolved.
Serné's debut novel Nachtbloeiers (Night Bloomers, 2022) was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize and the Hebban Debut Prize, and published in German translation (Weissbooks)
'The novel's greatest strengths are its setting and the atmosphere Serné conjures, comparable to W.F. Hermans' Beyond Sleep.
de Volkskrant
A subtle exploration of transience and vulnerability, of trauma and memory, and of the complex relationship between humans and nature: how people are afraid of what they seek to protect, and destroy what they love.
Trouw
