Overview

Full Description 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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9781969498213

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Reviews

""I have read hundreds of nonfiction 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. Her story of the life of a complicated woman set against the background of a climb of one of the world's highest mountains is elegantly written and extremely moving. Arthur's sensitive portrayal of Nepal captures the essence of that wonderful and peculiar kingdom and the true ambivalence of many Westerners toward it. Her images are vivid, her prose lyrical yet precise."" Arlene Blum, author of Annapurna: A Woman's Place ""Arthur writes marvelously of the beauties and dangers of mountain climbing, but she is most skilled when it comes to illuminating the indelible traceries of the inner life of her central character. Bit by bit she reveals the interweaving of heart and spirit, the intricate connections with others, the struggle for survival of self."" Publisher's Weekly, Aug. 12, 1983 ""The story of the climb and of the avalanche. . . is as stunning, stark and subtle as the blue and white landscape that enchants these people. Arthur...chooses words as carefully as her narrator chooses where to place her foot or to hammer a piton. She makes her reader think afresh about tired words like 'happiness' and 'guilt', and she makes a foreign world - of Sherpas in Gore-Tex parkas and of belays below aretes - seem the only one that matters."" The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 1984 ""Believability within the context of the extraordinary is a remarkable feature of Arthur's book. The high degree of emotional truth in addition to the foreign, graphic world of mountaineering make it uniquely memorable...Beyond the Mountain is, for all its brevity, a densely woven, ambitious book. Its concerns and characters, its lyricism and sculpted form will speak to and impress the sensitive reader."" Gardner McFall, Washington Post Book World ""When writing about nature, Arthur is outstanding....There are moments with the stark intensity of a dream."" Alice Hoffman, New York Sunday Times Book Review, Nov 20, 1983 ""Beyond the Mountain is a superb novel, elegantly written, gracefully developed, created with intelligence, good humor and deep insights into human nature. Elizabeth Arthur brings to the subject of mountaineering a mind that is supple, unprotected, uncommonly receptive, and wise. Her thoroughly imagined book has all the power of autobiography and all the suspense of a great adventure."" Ron Hansen ""[Arthur] writes with the tactile grace of someone who has both registered and contemplated experience....Climbing fiction this good is a rarity."" Steven Jervis, American Alpine Journal, Winter 1994

Author Information

Elizabeth Arthur is the author of five literary novels (Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps) and two memoirs (Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone.) Her books have been published by Harper and Row, Doubleday, Knopf, and Bloomsbury U.K. She has received fellowships and grants from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Council on the Arts, the Ossabaw Island Project, and the Indiana Arts Commission. She twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and was the first novelist ever given an Antarctic Artists and Writers Operational Support Grant from the National Science Foundation. Her novel Antarctic Navigation was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book. She is the co-author, with her husband Steven Bauer, of the 26 mystery/adventure novels in the New Three Investigators series (2025-2027.) Steven Bauer is the author of three books for young people, the young adult fantasy Satyrday, the middle grade novel A Cat of a Different Color, and The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle, a picture book in verse. Bauer's writing has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He has also been given grants and awards from Prairie Schooner, the Ossabaw Island Project, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and the Indiana Arts Commission. He is the co-author, with his wife Elizabeth Arthur, of the 26 mystery/adventure novels in the New Three Investigators series (2025-2027.)

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