The novel by young Swedish author Jerker Virdborg (b. 1971) was published in 2002 and quickly became a bestseller. The reasons for this are both its intense, captivating plot and its pacifist themes.

The setting is a fictional future in a fictional Scandinavian country. War. Four soldiers receive a mission to skate across a frozen sea overnight to reach a base cut off from the main territory.

However, the external action's fictional nature is balanced by the specificity of the characters' internal experiences, transforming an engaging thriller into a nuanced psychological novel.