What is your book about?

What is your book about?

Benedict Allen (Explorer) gives expert video advice on: What is your book about?; Where can I get it?; Why did you write your first book? and more...

Into the Abyss is the story of my journey through Siberia. I went and did a trek of 1,000 kilometers through the far eastern end of Siberia, it's called the Russian Far East, in fact. I had to train a dog team of ten dogs, who didn't really want to go with me, partly because they knew I wasn't a local. They knew I was from Shepherd's Bush. Well, they could sense, at least, that I didn't really belong out there. And it turned out to be the worst winter in living memory. So it became a story really of adaptation, of how I had to cope in this environment and set about my final objective, which was to cross the Bering Strait, a 50-mile bit of frozen sea at the end of a sort of training session. So it's on the one hand, a superficial story of a journey, one man's attempt to master a dog team and to cross the Bering Strait at the end of this long trek. But on the other hand, it's also my personal investigation into survival. How do any of us cope when up against it? I've always been fascinated by survival, because I've had a lot of near death-incidents, I've almost died I suppose about six times. So my life, I thought, ooh, I've had all these terrible times and I ought to look back and investigate further about what keeps people going, and nowhere is there a better place in the world than Siberia. Because if you're going to send someone to somewhere nasty on the planet, you think Siberia is the place. People are sentenced to Siberia, in the gulags and so on. So I thought it would be great to see how people who live naturally in this place, the Chukchis and the Inuit, how do they cope. So that was my personal motive, to understand about survival.