The Living Mountain

by Shepherd, Nan; Macfarlane, Robert; Odell, Jenny

• ISBN13: 9781668066591
• ISBN10: 1668066599
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-03-18
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

“In a world of self-help, this is true inspiration, deeply admirable without the distance of heroism, bracing without stridency and, ultimately, generous. The mountain, Shepherd tells us, is ‘a corrective of glib assessment.’ So is its book.” —The New York Times Book Review

An internationally bestselling classic on the power of the natural world—“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, The New York Times).

This masterpiece of nature writing by Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into “the high and holy places” of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world of spectacular cliffs, deep silences, and lakes so clear that they cannot be imagined. As she walks through clouds, endures blizzards, and watches the great spirals of eagles in flight, Shepherd comes to know something about the hidden life of this remarkable landscape—and also herself.

The Living Mountain is the result of one woman’s lifetime spent in search of the essential nature of the wild world around her. Composed during World War II, Shepherd’s manuscript lay untouched for almost four decades, nearly lost to time, before it was finally published. In the decades since, audiences and critics of all generations have embraced it as a classic, an enduring testament to the magnificence of mountains and our communion with the environment.

Author Biography

Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) was a Scottish writer, educator, and poet. An intrepid hiker throughout her life, she spent hundreds of days and journeyed thousands of miles on foot in the Caingorms of Scotland. She published three novels—The QuarryWood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians—and a volume of poetry—In the Cairngorms—in an extraordinary six-year burst between 1928 and 1934. After a period of creative silence, she composed The Living Mountain during the Second World War. However, the manuscript was stashed away in a drawer for nearly four decades before its publication in 1977.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prizewinning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people, and places, including The Lost Words and Underland. His work has been translated into many languages and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage, and radio. In 2017, he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and author. Her first book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy was a New York Times bestseller. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra magazine, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.