Cycling to the Arctic

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at twenty-three, David was told to slow down, take it easy, watch himself. He climbed a rock face the next morning.

Twenty-five years and a small mountain of insulin pens later, and a warning from his doctor that if he didn’t sort himself out, he would likely go blind or lose a limb, David set off from The UK on a fully loaded bicycle, solo, with nothing but a target pinned to the map: the Arctic Circle. What followed was hundreds of miles through The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden's endless forests, to the frozen edge of the world, all fuelled by grit, dark humour, and the constant, unglamorous arithmetic of blood sugar — hypos in the wilderness, insulin that may not survive, a body that kept threatening to quit and a mind that refused to.

Equal parts misadventure and reckoning, Cycling to the Arctic is a memoir that refuses to be a "how to" book about illness and insists instead on being a "can do" one. Funny, unsparing, and often wildly stubborn, it's a story for anyone who's ever been told what they can’t do — and gone and done it anyway.