He was utterly and completely beautiful out there on the ice.
A creature of ice and fire.
Set in a vividly realised Scottish village, Ice Dancing is a passionate, grown-up love story about desire, disruption, and the cost of loving deeply.
Helen is nearing forty and drifting into a life she never consciously chose: married, settled, and quietly discontented, with her only child preparing to leave home. She has learned how to endure-but not how to want. Then Joe arrives.
Joe is a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a Scottish team, nine years younger and dangerously compelling. On the ice he is grace and power combined; off it, he is courteous, articulate-and carrying wounds far darker than Helen suspects. What begins as an instant, electric attraction becomes something far more complicated, testing loyalty, identity, and the fragile structures of ordinary lives.
As Helen tells her own story, Ice Dancing explores desire at first sight, the rhythms of rural life, and the emotional toll of sporting ambition. Beneath the romance lies a darker current-of sorrow, betrayal, and the possibility that love, even when it arrives too late or at too high a price, can still offer healing.
By award-winning novelist and playwright Catherine Czerkawska, this is an intimate, emotionally powerful novel with a haunting edge.