There are secrets beneath her skin.

Sorykah Minuit is a scholar, an engineer, and the sole woman aboard an ice-drilling submarine in the frozen land of the Sigue. What no one knows is that she is also a Trader: one who can switch genders suddenly, a rare corporeal deviance universally met with fascination and superstition and all too often punished by harassment or death.

Sorykah's infant twins, Leander and Ayeda, have inherited their mother's Trader genes. When a wealthy, reclusive madman known as the Collector abducts the babies to use in his dreadful experiments, Sorykah and her male alter-ego, Soryk, must cross icy wastes and a primeval forest to get them back. Complicating the dangerous journey is the fact that Sorykah and Soryk do not share memories: Each disorienting transformation is like awakening with a jolt from a deep and dreamless sleep.

The world through which the alternating lives of Sorykah and Soryk travel is both familiar and surreal. Environmental degradation and genetic mutation run amok; humans have been distorted into animals and animal bodies cloak a wild humanity. But it is also a world of unexpected beauty and wonder, where kindness and love endure amid the ruins. Alluring, intense, and gorgeously rendered, Ice Song is a remarkable debut by a fiercely original new writer.

"Kasai's strikingly original but uneven debut posits a world where DNA has gone wild, producing Traders with amazing abilities and 'somatics' with a mix of animal and human genes. Sorykah Minuit, a gender-switching Trader, arrives in the dirty, dangerous polar town of Ostara to meet her twin children and their nursemaid. She encounters an octopus-woman who tells her the children have been abducted by the Trader-torturing Collector. Passages of stunning imagery veer abruptly into purple prose as Sorykah heads into the perilous, icy wilderness, only to pause her maternal quest for an extended romp at an isolated pleasure-house. After a brush with death, she abruptly becomes a man with no memory of female life. Kasai's imaginative reach exceeds her grasp, and she squeezes in numerous intriguing ideas that languish only partially explored." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Environmental degradation and genetic mutation run amok; humans have become distorted into animals and animal bodies mask a wild humanity. Alluring, intense, and gorgeously rendered, "Ice Song" is a remarkable debut by a fiercely original new writer.