Available now!

UPHEAVAL: A short novel

A new short novel about an ice tsunami that devastates the Canadian Maritimes

Eighty-six year old Duff Gillies didn’t want to die without telling the story of what he’d witnessed during the great ice tsunami that devastated Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia back in 2026. That was the winter he’d agreed to take young Izzy Walker on as his student aboard the Ice Queen and the year polar bears invaded the Gulf of St. Lawrence for the first time. After an unsettling polar bear encounter out on the ice, Duff thought he’d seen everything. Then three ice-covered waves turned his quiet maritime existence upside down. Called on to help a good friend rescue his brother, he and Izzy witnessed first-hand the devastating toll the tsunami had taken. But Duff had an experience no one else did and it came to haunt him. This fictional first-person account of the greatest tsunami disaster ever to hit a North American shore is a story you won’t want to miss. It’s a short novel that will leave you astonished at the destructive power a tsunami can muster when it teams up with thick sea ice cover.

Available for pre-order in ebook format at Amazon (release date 3 December) and immediately in paperback (release date 30 November), all countries.

Background: Off Cape Breton Island on 17 March 2015 (below), ferry jammed in thick sea ice with a Canadian Coast Guard ice breaker coming to the rescue.

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EATEN – A Polar Bear Attack Thriller (2015)

What Jaws did for the beaches of New England, Eaten does for northern Newfoundland. Terror and carnage abound as hungry polar bears come ashore in droves seeking any food available, including human prey. Set in the year 2025 at the edge of the Arctic, the story considers future possibilities no one has yet contemplated. Call it JAWS for the 21st century – just when you thought it was safe to stay out of the water! The historic but uniquely revitalized Newfoundland community of Fogo Island features prominently in the tale.

Book Summary In this tale, the occupants of 100s of small towns and isolated outports spread across northern Newfoundland are quite unprepared for an early spring onslaught of hungry polar bears. People haven’t just been killed, they’ve been eaten. As the attacks multiply, people find they are not safe even in their own homes. Local residents, Mounties, and biologists on Fogo Island struggle with a disturbing new reality: they have a huge polar bear problem on their hands, and if they don’t find a solution quickly, dozens more people will die gruesome deaths, and hundreds more polar bears will be shot. A Newfoundland seal biologist gets help from an expat Alaskan carnivore specialist as they team up with officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to address the threat. Stopping the carnage and the relentless terror will be the biggest challenge they’ve ever faced as they struggle to prevent this from being the most horrifying disaster in Newfoundland’s history.

From science to science fiction?

I’m a scientist but I grew up in a family of storytellers and avid fiction readers. When it was clear the time had come to try my hand at writing a novel, it felt like a logical progression from science writing, not a leap. Starting with polar bears just felt right. For years, polar bear specialists have being playing “what-if.” They’ve used computer models to predict polar bear responses to computer-predicted sea ice conditions 25-90 years into the future and call their “what-if” science. I decided to play too – except I call my “what-if” fiction. In the literary world, it’s called speculative fiction. See the book trailer below (feel free to distribute): https://youtu.be/3Zw9DCvPTD8 Read Chapter 1 here. Click on the menu icon in the header (the little black box in the header, to the right of my name) to find the Recommended Reading list from the end of the book, with links (for those who want to follow-up the science background). Here’s a copy of the press release Eaten_A Polar Bear Attack Thriller_Press Release_Nov 16 2015.

Here’s where to buy it

Paperback: with FREE DELIVERY WORLDWIDE: The Book Depository Paperback book or Kindle ebook on Amazon.com (US), click on the icon below, where the “look-inside” feature is now activated:

In the UK, both paperback and Kindle versions are available.

Canadian paperback (here) ships from the US, Kindle version here.

In Germany, both paperback and Kindle versions are available.

In France, both paperback and Kindle versions are available.

For other countries, search your local Amazon site for “Eaten Crockford”

Paperback and ebook (NOOK version) available at Barnes & Noble Kobo ebook version at the Kobo bookstore Apple device version at iTunes ePub version (via Smashwords, which ships to Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo), see https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/592875

To request a review copy (either paperback or ebook format), fill out the Contact Me page (menu box, upper right).

December 2015: See EATEN featured on the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) webpage here. January 2016: I did an end of January 2016 interview for the Northern Pen newspaper (St. Anthony, Nfld and the Northern Peninsula), copied below – picked up by sister outlets The Labradorian and The Pilot (Lewisporte) the next week. April 2016: Two featured entries at BC BookLook: “Who’s who”: C is for Crockford. Susan J. Crockford is a rarity–someone who has mainly made her living off her ability and scientific technical skill for identifying animal bones for biologists and archaeologists. She has travelled extensively for her work and written numerous scientific papers. Having honed her science writing for a general audience on a blog called PolarBearScience since 2012, Crockford used her eclectic professional background, and her experiences as an avid fiction reader, to publish her first novel, Eaten (Createspace/Amazon 2015), described as “a polar bear attack thriller.” “Bone detective gets scarey” [sic] June 2016: (see my ad in the Summer 2016 issue of BC BookLook): My BC BookLook essay: “Some bare facts about self-publishing” AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY After years of writing scientific papers and books and blogging about polar bears for non-scientists, scientist Susan Crockford has written her first novel—for readers who prefer their science “lite” and love a good story. Susan is a professional zoologist who has studied polar bear ecology and evolution for more than 20 years and has a special interest in the history of human-polar bear interactions. She has a Ph.D. and writes about the science of polar bears and related topics at www.polarbearscience.com. See the About page on my blog (here) for more detail on my background, and even more detailed publication history at www.pacificid.com under the Research tab. TAGS: hungry polar bear; polar bear attack; Newfoundland; Fogo Island; St. Anthony; Lewisporte; Twillingate; Gander; RCMP; sea ice; Labrador; Strait of Belle Isle; fiction; NASW; polar bear; novel; Crockford; Alaska; grizzly; Beaufort Sea; Fogo, Tilting;