Mountains Of The Mind

WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARDOnce we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.

Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, won the 2003 Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was adapted by the BBC. It was also shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize for the Literature of Place, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountaineering Literature and the Banff Mountain Literature Award and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It was acclaimed as 'one of the two most important books written around the experience of mountains in the past fifty years'. His next book, The Wild Places, was adapted as part of the BBC's Natural World series. Robert MacFarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge with his family.