The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland
Nan Shepherd
'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian
Introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Afterword by Jeanette Winterson
In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape.
Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.
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About Nan Shepherd
Reviews for The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland
Guardian
Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different
ROBERT MACFARLANE Reading [The Living Mountain] seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else. There is no substitute for reading
Jeanette Winterson
If you read it, you too will feel changed. This is sublime, in the 18th-century sense, when landscapes like these were terrifying. And she achieves it in language that is almost incantatory, like a spell
Nicholas Lezard
Guardian
A masterpiece . . . Amongst the greatest works of nature writing to come out of Britain
Chitra Ramaswamy
The Scotsman
An impressionistic and weather infused memoir of her experiences of walking and living in the wild landscape of the Cairngorms . . . A key influence on modern nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane
Herald
I absolutely loved The Living Mountain - part memoir, part field notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature and our relationship with it, evocative of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston and John Muir
MARIA POPOVA, ‘Brain Pickings’
New York Times