"We were flying down the slopes, faster than we knew was safe, our eyes streaming, a great wide, white softness ahead, a fifty-mile view hovering at the edge of our vision, shouting with excitement. From that moment, I was hooked. Since then, I have been a snow person."

What is it about snow that leaves us spellbound? What draws us to play with it, sledge over it, tell stories about it, build our homes out of it, and sometimes even risk our lives in it? In this unique book - a sparkling mixture of eulogy, history and travelogue - self-confessed snow obsessive Charlie English wraps up warm and goes in search of the answers.

Combining on-the-slopes experience with off-piste research, Charlie follows in the footsteps of the Romantic poets across the Alps; learns how to build igloos with the Inuit on Baffin Island; examines snow-patches in the Cairngorms to detect signs of global warming; and tests his mettle on some of the most perilous peaks on earth, along the way meeting up with a flurry of fellow enthusiasts from avalanche survivors and resort operators to climate scientists and champion skiers.

"A thing of wonder and delight. A perfect winter book" Metro

"Mr English is a polymath who wears his learning lightly. His book is a cracking read that deserves to be by the bedside of every keen skier or snowboarder" The Economist

"The story of Mr English's feeling for snow makes a book as delicious as a double chocolate liegeois" The Times

"An enthralling journey to some of the planet's most frigid corners" TNT magazine

"English writes wonderfully" The Daily Telegraph

"A far more intriguing account than much current travel literature... The places he visits are sometimes perilously cold, but English's account is touchingly warm" The Guardian

"Incredibly, what seems like the most vanishingly tiny subject actually turns out to encompass vast tracts of our experience - science, art, history, sociology, the past and future, the personal and even the spiritual" The Observer

"This isn't simply the latest hand-wringing eco-polemic to hit our bookshops - it's both more subtle and more personal than that" The Scotsman

"A finely written and many-sided account of the fascination - both fearful and loving - that we have for snow. Charlie English deftly weaves together history, reportage, travelogue and memoir into a gentle, erudite and at times beautiful book" Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind

"An enchanting tale of one man's search for snow, a report on the precarious state of our extreme climates, an evocative poem to lost childhood winters: I was gripped, from the first flakes to the final thaw..." Joanna Kavenna, author of The Ice Museum

"Contains one of the best accounts I can remember of the harrowing experience of setting yourself a target - in Charlie's case, the celebrated haute route that runs from Chamonix to Zermatt - and failing to reach it. Highly recommended" Richard Williams, the Guardian

"Charlie English has the good journalist's ability to absorb a great deal of information and pass it on in a vivid and intelligent way, combing it with his own experiences... A compelling and paradoxically heart-warming book." Irish Times