chana cox

Inungilak is set in the 1980s. The Cold War is still hot, The Distant Early Warning Line is still protecting North America from nuclear attack, and the Russians are still up to no good. The book came to me when I found myself in an ocean going canoe north of the Arctic Circle. Each lift of the bow and drop into the waves had me convinced that my vertebrae were being flattened. I sat there for hours on end helpless while the winds strengthened and hundreds of arctic tern circled overhead laughing their heads off at me. And I thought, “What am I, a Jewish middle aged mother of five doing here?”

Naomi Solomon, my fictional heroine, was born in that moment.

In 1980 Naomi Solomon was a newly minted Ph.D. with a brilliant academic career ahead of her. She was also a klutz – too short, too plump, and too near-sighted to be of much use to anyone. Naomi was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn who had never learned how to drive a car, had never been off the pavement, and knew far more about everyone else than she knew about herself. She was working on an archaeological dig in the Eastern Canadian Arctic.

She was also an undercover C.I.A. agent.

So, how does a girl like that end up in the CIA, being run down by polar bear, chasing Soviet spies in canoes, and, just coincidentally, saving the world?

Inungilak is her story.