When Raven, a history graduate working in her local museum, helps prepare a bicentenary exhibition for a small curling club, she expects nothing more than familiar records and carefully managed memory. She has already written the club’s history once—for her dissertation—and knows its gaps as well as its dates.

But during the 2027 celebrations, a simple touch of a granite cairn draws Raven into the club’s past: to frozen lochs, disputed beginnings, breakaway members, lost medals, and moments that never quite made it into the minutes. Moving quietly through two centuries, she witnesses the lived reality behind official records—how clubs fracture and reunite, how objects are trusted and misplaced, and how decisions made for practical reasons shape memory for generations.

Raven does not change history. She learns instead how fragile it is, and how resilient. As she returns to the present, she must decide what belongs in the record, what must remain unresolved, and whether some losses are not failures of preservation, but part of what allows a community to endure.

What the Ice Kept is a reflective, atmospheric novel about time, attention, and the things that wait beneath the surface—asking not what history can give back to us, but what it asks us to leave untouched.