WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE
A monumental work of history, biography and adventure – the First World War, Mallory and Mount Everest – now serialised in the BBC R4 documentary The Crowning of Everest.
‘The price of life is death’
For Mallory, as for all of his generation, death was but ‘a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day’. As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. What mattered now was how one lived, and the moments of being alive.
While the quest for Mount Everest may have begun as a grand imperial gesture, it ended as a mission of revival for a country and a lost generation bled white by war. In a monumental work of history and adventure, Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept climbing on that fateful day.
‘An extraordinary book on an extraordinary generation’ Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void
‘An instant classic of mountaineering literature’ Guardian
A moving, epic masterpiece’ The Times
