PEN (NZ) Best First Book Award for Nonfiction This tells a story of Antarctica as seen through the eyes of an Adelie Penguin.
As a book intended for an adult readership, it is unusual because of LSD's use of an animal narrator to tell the story from its point of view. While such a perspective is a device often used in children's books, it is seldom used in books for a mature audience – in part, at least, because of the difficulty of making such a device convincing. And, while such an approach has sometimes been executed well in novels like Watership Down, it is even rarer for it to be attempted and pulled off successfully with a nonfiction book.
Published by Pavilion in the UK and Harcourt Brace in the USA, the book is also distinguished by the accompanying photographs: all taken by the author.