The Country Beyond The Storm

In July 1926, British pilot, surveyor and naturalist Arthur Harcourt takes off from the eastern coast of Greenland in a modified Avro biplane. His task is simple: photograph the inland mountains and return before the approaching storm.

He never returns.

Driven off course by violent weather that renders his instruments useless, Harcourt passes through an uncharted mountain gap and crashes in a country that should not exist.

Beyond the ice lies a vast green wilderness of forests, lakes, abandoned settlements and ancient roads. Creatures believed extinct still walk its valleys, while survivors of lost expeditions have built new lives beyond the reach of the outside world.

Harcourt soon discovers that entering this hidden country is far easier than leaving it. Compasses cannot be trusted, the mountain passages disappear beneath the storm, and the great Stone Bells sound warnings that no outsider fully understands.

With supplies dwindling and danger closing around him, Harcourt must cross the unknown land, place his trust in those who have every reason to guard its secrets, and find a way back through the ice before the passage closes again.

Thirty days after his disappearance, Harcourt walks into a remote Danish station-injured, exhausted and more than three hundred miles from where he was last seen. His aeroplane is never recovered, and he refuses to explain where he has been.

Decades later, a locked expedition case is discovered beneath the floor of his Northumberland cottage. Inside lies the extraordinary account presented here.

The Country Beyond the Storm is an atmospheric lost-world adventure filled with Arctic exploration, prehistoric creatures, buried history and the mystery of a place absent from every map.