Book excerpt: Driven by a yearning to experience the vast skies and frozen beauty of the North, Gavin Francis goes in search of the people living along the northern limits of Europe. From the first Greek explorers to the Vikings to modern polar adventurers, he travels through history and legend to find out why – and how – we are drawn to the North. Francis's encounters in the Arctic teach him as much about that sense of longing for the North, and of belonging to the North as the seafarers, warriors, monks and poets whose stories he follows. In Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and Lapland, Francis finds a way of life characterised by both peace and unease, threatened as it is by the shadow of climate change and the tense, ever-increasing importance of Arctic Europe in global power politics.