Beyond the Mountain
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Book Overview
IN THE HEART OF THE WORLD, IN THE MOUNTAINS OF NEPAL, THE PAST DEMANDS ITS RECKONING
A celebrated mountaineer joins an all-women's expedition in Nepal, where the mountain's brutal beauty forces her to confront the past events -- and the grief -- that drove her to the Himalayas.
"I have read hundreds of non-fiction and dozens of fiction books on the subject of mountaineering. Beyond the Mountain is the best-written and most compelling novel relating to climbing I have ever read. Elizabeth Arthur is an extremely gifted novelist." Arlene Blum
"Stunning, stark, and subtle...Arthur chooses words as carefully as her narrator chooses where to place her foot or hammer a piton." The New Yorker
Elizabeth Arthur's first book, Island Sojourn, won her praise for its extraordinary subtlety and depth. Beyond the Mountain, her first work of fiction, marks another kind of beginning - the arrival of an important novelist whose second book is as vivid as her first, but even more finely hewn in its nuance and violence. Its beautifully crafted observations reveal, in Joseph Conrad's words, "a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe."
A celebrated mountaineer, Artemis Phillips has spent years scaling the world's great ranges in partnership with her husband and her brother. Now, joining an all-women's expedition in Nepal, she embarks on a climb that is more than just a physical challenge. The mountain's brutal simplicity strips away all pretense, forcing Temis to confront the past events that have driven her to the Himalayas.
Readers of Jon Krakauer, Arlene Blum, and Peter Matthiessen will find Beyond the Mountain both a journey into the high-altitude world of extreme mountaineering and a profound meditation on guilt, expiation, and survival.
In a story as sharp and unexpected as the icy ridges its protagonist must navigate, Beyond the Mountain explores the exhilarating - and perilous - pull of high-altitude adventure. Arthur renders the Himalayan landscape and its people with unparalleled poetry and specificity, capturing not just the grandeur of Nepal, but also the raw, unfiltered experience of memory, desire, and the terrible weight of grief.
With prose as clear and startling as the high mountain air, Arthur delivers a searing portrait of ambition, passion, and the fierce solitude of those who seek meaning at the edge of the world. She writes with the tactile grace of someone who has truly lived her story's trials - illuminating not only the beauty and danger of the mountains but the stark truths of the questing human heart.
Hailed upon its original release as a masterwork of climbing fiction and a profound meditation on the human condition, Beyond the Mountain is an electric, obsessive immersion into the front-pointing ascent of life itself.
With a Foreword by Elizabeth Arthur's husband, Steven Bauer.
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