THESHACKLETONTROPHY

Three teams attempt the Shackleton Trophy — reaching the South Pole, North Pole and Mount Everest in the fastest possible time. CASE is led by Olaf Skinner, a polar legend whose obsession with beating his oldest rival, Carlton Cox, is curdling into something far more dangerous than ambition. FOX, Carlton’s team, doesn’t yet know it’s carrying a saboteur in its own ranks. And in the background, a third team isn’t being watched closely enough by anyone.

No one carries more into the ice than best friends Viktor and Eiger, whose real race was never against the clock — it’s against everything they’ve spent years running from. Everyone here carries a wound the ice can’t touch — old grief, old guilt, a love left unspoken too long — and the race is stripping all of it bare, one pole at a time. No one wins alone. Some of them will learn that too late.

As the survivors claw toward Everest’s summit, the real cost of the Trophy stops being time, and starts being the truth each of them has spent the whole race outrunning.

At the South Pole, a hidden saboteur turns a race into a hunt for someone to blame. At the North Pole, the ice takes its first life — and breaks something in one man that nothing since has touched. In Nepal, buried family surfaces just as buried loves does too. And on Everest, in the thin air where every breath costs more than the body has left to give, one team's obsession finally outruns its judgment.

Not every team that starts this race finishes it. Not every team that finishes it wins.

By the time it's over, the real prize was never the €5,000,000. It was who came home — and what they were finally honest enough to admit they'd been running from the whole time.

Daniel Akerman has skied to the North Pole and trekked to Everest Base Camp — trips that planted the idea for this novel's three-pole race, first drafted in a Creative Writing class at UCLA.  By trade, he has spent most of his career in media and brand strategy, work built entirely around storytelling.

THE SHACKLETON TROPHY is his first novel.

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