Climbers

M. John Harrison

'No one alive can write sentences like he can. He's the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf' Olivia Laing

'Among the most brilliant novelists writing today' Robert Macfarlane

'Truly gets to the heart of that strange indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape' Benjamin Myers

Retreating from the ruins of his marriage Mike leaves London for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors where he falls in with a group of climbers - a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb.

Travelling from abandoned urban quarries to misty lichened crags Mike discovers an intensity of experience - a wash of pain fear and excitement - that causes the rest of his world to recede. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline folklore and camaraderie of the sport he begins to lose his grip on the line between passion and obsession - at a cost.

With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane