Kate Mawjee 
coldest place on earth 

’The coldest place on earth’ is an intimate, affecting and beautifully realised journey into the mind of Irina Petruchevsky; an ordinary woman, fighting to survive a life lived in a truly extraordinary world. Irina runs a failing motel in a dying Siberian town. She supplements her dwindling income by trekking to the weather station, beyond the last, lonely wooden house at the very end of Libsky Street, to record the daily temperature. But when a young woman from Moscow, Anya, arrives at the motel, Irina’s precarious existence is threatened. Anya is an engineer, sent from the Institute to automate the weather station. It seems Irina’s services will no longer be needed. Desperate to delay the work, Irina gathers her courage and begins a conversation that could change her life forever.