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Towards the beginning of Brother in Ice, the debut novel by Catalan artist Alicia Kopf, is a photograph of the American explorer Frederick Cook arriving at the North Pole in 1908 The image, captured in the midst of a snowstorm, is blurred and the vista it discloses is of a heroic mission rendered distinctly uncertain, as limp as the flag that the man on the right attempts half-heartedly to hold up for the moment the shutter clicks On the opposite page, we read: ‘What does such a conquest represent and how is it, in turn, represented?’ The question (which exposes masculinity and conquest alike as fragile constructs) is one which this book insistently wrestles with It might be further rephrased as: ‘What is the relationship between narrative form and a history of conquest, and how might female experience figure in and as the fissure between them?’   The triangulation of personal and artistic life is the central premise of Kopf’s book, which is digressive in structure and subject matter Its intersecting arcs and tentative ruminations are perhaps most closely allied with those of the essay (with ‘the combination of exactitude and evasion’ which Brian Dillon identifies as typical of the genre) It is composed of research notes about Arctic exploration, fictional meanders on the life of a female artist, diary entries on the precarity of hopping from one creative job to another (and one elusive man to another), and illustrations that endlessly refigure how an icy landscape appears to the photographic eye Kopf’s text meditates on this question of perception, and how it relates to female creativity, as well as to the difficulties of rendering her brother’s autism legible (or illegible) on the page – taking the more typically autofictional elements of the book a little off their designated map   Kopf is interested in charting the unknown: in the impulse that sends men to the other ends of the earth; in the fragility of photography as documentary evidence and in its intimate relation to the autobiographical; and in what a fragmentary narrative technique might expose about the larger aims of plotting female