On Thin Ice by Charlie Walker review – a Siberian adventure goes off the rails

Moments of beauty and horror punctuate this account of an ill-timed sub-zero camping trip In late February 2022, Charlie Walker set off on a hiking holiday in northern Siberia. In temperatures as low as -50C, he intended to trek a thousand miles north along the frozen surface of the river Lena, then out across the solid Laptev Sea to the port town of Tiksi, before finally flying home to London. “The plan,” he writes, “was simple in concept.” A sub-zero camping trip through a region populated...

By Charlie Gilmour