Top 10 books about Alaska

What is Alaska? Rugged homeland of resilient Native Americans, former Russian colony, site of the only battle of the second world war to take place on US soil … wait a minute, second world war battlefield? Believe it. The blind spot most of us have about Alaska is nearly as vast as its geography – it's about seven times the size of the UK. In 1943, one of the toughest and least-known American battles of the war took place in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Discovering this little-known historical fact compelled me to study Alaska's remarkable history and eventually write my second novel, a tale of wartime survival and devotion, The Wind is Not a River.

Alaska is a place at the very limits of the American drive to "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country" – the exhortation made famous by the 19th-century author Horace Greeley. Greeley's advice soon came to be understood in the popular culture as: "Go West, young man, and find your fame and your fortune." Alaska is a place apart from the contiguous United States, and it shares more in common with Canada's Yukon territory and British Columbia. It is a place of big dreams and harsh realities, astounding landscape, curious politics (including a long-standing independence party), midnight summer sun, and shockingly brief winter days. Alaska also offers the increasingly rare opportunity to live in close proximity to vast tracts of wilderness. The following shortlist includes books I discovered while living (briefly) in Alaska, and through gathering research for my novel. This collection of fiction, nonfiction, and verse has found a permanent home on my bookshelf.

1. Coming Into the Country by John McPhee

This book, more than any other I have read, accurately reflected back to me the stark realities and wide-ranging possibilities facing Alaska near the close of the 20th century, while offering insight into what the state might become. McPhee is a grand master of narrative nonfiction. Required reading for anyone who wants to know about the grand themes and petty politics of the largest state in the US.

2. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

A bestselling book and critically acclaimed movie, Into the Wild tells the tale of one young man's search for meaning in wilderness that ends in an abandoned bus in Alaska. The book is about so much more than the state itself. It's also about what people bring to Alaska – disaffection, idealism, the search for reinvention and redemption – that ends up being swallowed by one of the wildest places in North America.

3. Where the Sea Breaks its Back by Corey Ford

This is an extraordinary and compelling account of a 1741-1742 Russian expedition. Ford vividly recounts the story of naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller's voyage to the Aleutian Islands and what would eventually become the colony of Russian America. Wonderful writing and gripping tales of the Russian discovery of the new world.

4. Travels in Alaska by John Muir

The Scottish-American naturalist and explorer showed up in Alaska 138 years after Steller, just a dozen years after the US purchased Alaska from the cash-strapped Russians for about two pennies per acre. This insightful, enthusiastic and closely observed travelogue offers description and language as grandiose as the place itself. "To the lover of pure wildness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world … it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed."

5. Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service

Service, a British-Canadian poet and writer, was known as "the bard of the Yukon". OK, so it's not Alaska proper, but the state and Canada's Yukon territory are kissing cousins, and share much in the way of folklore and culture. And most prospectors had to travel through Alaska to get to the Klondike goldfields. Service wrote colourful and compulsively entertaining verse about gold rush life in the north. Alaskans try and claim him as their own. As a graduate of Robert Service High School in Anchorage, Alaska, I made a point of memorising Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee. I still have several verses rolling around inside my head.

6. White Fang by Jack London

One of the most popular books by American writer Jack London also happens to be set in the Yukon during the time of the Klondike Gold Rush. The story follows the life story of a wolf-dog hybrid that finds its way from the chaos of famine and violence, in both the natural world and at the jagged edge of human society, to a kind of redemption in a life of domesticity in the care of one gentle man. Brutal and gripping.

7. The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians by Brian Garfield

There are numerous nonfiction accounts of the war in Alaska; first and foremost among those is Garfield's excellent – and compulsively readable – military history of what some call the "forgotten war." Richly detailed and deeply researched, it deserves a far wider audience.

8. Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir by Ray Hudson

A sensitive and insightful account of 28 years living in the Aleutian Islands from the perspective of an outsider. I believe the best reportage is the kind that involves a writer immersing himself or herself in a place, culture and time. These days, being still and letting the story reveal itself is difficult to accomplish and increasingly rare. Ray Hudson offers personal and enriching insight into Aleut culture in this fine memoir.

9. Call of the Wild by Jack London

A novella that preceded White Fang, London's Call of the Wild tells a similarly engrossing tale of sled dogs and men set in the Klondike. Unlike White Fang, with its ultimate redemption, Call of the Wild details a fall from a civilised to a primitive state. Influenced by both Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche, London's most famous work is rich in symbolism and imagery, a blend of allegory and fable about the "survival of the fittest". This classic and enduring tale of the mythic north secured London's place in the cannon of American literature.

10. Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban

The British-born journalist and novelist takes readers on an involving personal and physical journey through fascinating history and waterways to the state that bills itself as "the last frontier". So much about what Alaska really is can only be understood through what it takes to get there. Before the advent of regularly scheduled air service, what one had to do to reach this place profoundly affected its literature. Alaska was one of the last places in North America to be mapped and explored. As Raban well knows, the journey to Alaska can still be transformational.

Read more top 10 books, as chosen by authors
Brian Payton is the author of The Wind Is Not a River (Mantle/Pan Macmillan)

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