A Dream in Polar Fog gave me the same haunting and powerful reading experience as did Melville's travel fictions. Yuri Rytkheu is a world-class writer. Part lyrical ethnography, part uncanny adventure movie, part historical saga, part spectral tone poem, this novel miraculously brings Siberia to the center of our lives.

Thousands of books have been written about the arctic aborigines by intruders from the south. Yuri Rytkheu has turned the skin inside out and written about the way the arctic people view outsiders. A Chukchi himself, Yuri writes with passion, strength, and beauty of a world we others have never understood. A splendid book.

This story by Yuri Rytkheu is the very story we have been waiting for: a love song to human survival, both physical and metaphysical, a true story about change and endurance, about the essential way to live in the world, about the eternal story while recounting the fleeting one.

A hypnotic, shimmering new novel. . . . One emerges from the novel and its sudden, jarring, most unusual but spot-on ending dazed, dazzled, snow-blind.

Rarely has humanity’s relationship to nature been so beautifully and vividly depicted . . . It recalls, in both substance and style, the best work of Jack London and Herman Melville, and it is a novel in the grandest sense of the word.

Rytkheu tells his story very well.

Through [...] his descriptions of hunting and putting up walrus and other sea mammals, Rytkheu explores complex emotional, cultural, spiritual, and linguistic negotiations.