‘Quiet and disquiet’: Laurence Fearnley’s grand glacial reading list

Buy The Grand Glacier Hotel here.

Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning New Zealand writer of short stories, novels, and non-fiction. She has held prestigious residencies like the Robert Burns Fellowship and the Artists to Antarctica Programme. At the Grand Glacier Hotel is nominated for the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.

Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano

These days I tend to ‘feel’ my way into a novel so, for me, creating a sensory, immersive, atmospheric, experience is more important than ‘telling a story’. I am a fan of contained, slow books. I first read Villa Triste back in the 1980s when I was reading a lot of French authors and it stayed with me over the years. It's a short book, set in the 1960s around the outbreak of the Algerian war. The location is a resort town, beside a lake, on the French-Swiss border. The protagonist is a young Jewish man, Victor Chmara, and he is keeping a low profile in an attempt to avoid being drafted. What struck me when I read it was the sense of quiet and disquiet, of being in a place that is seemingly protected and yet still impacted by outside forces. The faded glamour of the resort is beautifully described, and everything that unfolds is condensed and muted by memory. It's one of the great ‘hotel’ themed novel — a good companion to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

The subtitle: ‘Wherein is Discovered, The manner of his Setting out, His Dangerous Journey, And Safe Arrival at the Desired Country’. The Pilgrim’s Progress was one of those books I read at university for a Religious Studies paper in the 1980s and didn't think much more about it but I picked it up when I was recovering from cancer surgery as I had become curious about religious faith following various visits from hospital chaplains — conversations that had left me somewhat unmoved, spiritually-speaking.

Bunyan’s book, however, had a big impact on me and writing At the Grand Glacier Hotel. Burdened by sin, Christian, the protagonist of Pilgrim’s Progress, abandons his family and home and embarks on a pilgrimage towards the Celestial City. Along the journey he faces many mental and physical trials but is helped by various strangers who become his companions, notably Faithful and Hopeful. Rather than a spiritual burden, I was thinking of a physical burden and the idea of ‘walking towards’ a place of safety and peace, moving away from a place of physical pain.

Libby, the protagonist of Grand Glacier sets out alone, aided by a companion, James, who picks her up when she falls (the mud puddle is a kind of Slough of Despond). Just as Christian's adventures in The Pilgrim’s Progress follow a map (depicted on the front cover of my old Penguin copy), and is dotted with songs and verses, Libby follows a series of mapped-out clues on her quest. Bunyan’s real-life geographical location and travels influenced the settings he described: the river of death is based on the Thames, for example, so I took the idea and moved it to the West Coast: with fast flowing rivers, swamps, gnarled trees, bush and mountains all making an appearance alongside former gold-rush towns and communities.

Eventually, my protagonist, Libby, arrives at the Desired Country — though her companion, James, is last heard of flying to The Great Unknown (a mountain in Westland, near the Garden of Eden glacier).

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This was another re-read. I picked this up when I had to go to Christchurch for cancer surgery and I became fascinated with the depth of detail surrounding the medical treatments described in the book. Though its hospital life (and life beyond the hospital) is often brutal and bleak, it is also deeply human, even humorous. The central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, finds himself in the closed community of the hospital ward, amongst strangers who all have individual cultural and social backgrounds, personalities and quirks. I was thinking of some of these characters when I started picturing the guests at the Grand Glacier.

Buy The Grand Glacier Hotel here.