Climbers

A young man named Mike has lost his grip. Reeling from a failed marriage, feeling himself unmoored in a world of lonely maturity and dreary responsibility, he takes up rock-climbing. Rock is hard and real; a fall cannot be misinterpreted or argued away. Hanging off the side of a cliff, he thinks, he may yet be able to find purchase in a life that only makes less sense as he gets older. Joining the entourage of an inveterate climber called Normal, Mike travels from crag to crag, searching for transcendence and discovering an intensity of experience that obliterates the rest of his world. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore, and camaraderie of his chosen sport, Mike succeeds, for a time, in escaping from himself—but gravity never sleeps, and the ground is always waiting below. 

First published in 1989, Climbers is perhaps M. John Harrison’s most beloved, and most grounded, novels. (No pun intended.) One of the most celebrated living authors of fiction bordering and often crossing the line separating the fantastical and the mundane, Harrison plays merry hell with such classifications in Climbers, presenting a vision of landscape and nature as hallucinogenic and seductive as any fairyland, yet deadly as a warzone for anyone likely to lose their way, or their selves, amid the rocks.

“An intensely poetic and evocative brew of the interstices between sport, passion and obsession.” —The Times

"The prose ripples with mystery and lustrous turns of phrase, and there are flashes of humour, too . . . The landscapes are part J. G. Ballard, part Iain Sinclair . . . Equally at ease depicting suburban midlife crises and parallel universes, Harrison writes memorably about people who are bewildered, sidetracked, trapped or on the lookout for opportunities to change.” —Henry Hitchings, The Spectator 

“Reading Climbers today it's not just the incredible sense of a place and part and time of England that is so vividly done, but also the warm, complicated drawing of its people. As soon as I finished the book I missed, deeply, all that odd little gang with their obsession and their jargon and their pastime. Harrison's book is fossil and debris, with the qualities of both stone—pure, clean, hard, and the strange uncanniness that comes with finding a bottle top, say, that takes you back to a past decade.” —Will Burns

“[A] masterpiece . . . celebrated for its fine-grained depictions of the landscapes of Northern England through the seasons . . . Harrison is a psychological novelist whose fascination with trauma, repression and memory remains constant throughout his work. Climbers—the great hinge in Harrison’s career— is a novel-length attempt to view the past so clearly you can see the beard-frost.” —Nick Richardson, London Review of Books

“More than anything I've ever read, Climbers truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape, and the odd people compelled to conquer it in their own odd ways. It feels more than book—it's an adrenalized dream, a series of moods as changeable as the sky above. Unique is the only word for it.” —Benjamin Myers

Michael John Harrison is the author of, among others, the Viriconium stories, The Course of the Heart, Light, Nova Swing, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and The End of Everything. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Boardman Tasker Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives in Shropshire.

Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theater, radio, and dance.

Climbers • ISBN: 9798905610035

McNALLY EDITIONS no. 64 •

Pub: July 14, 2027

$19.00 • Paperback with flaps • 5.5” x 8.5” • 224 pages

Literary Fiction / Nature and Ecology

Rights: North America, Audio

eBook ISBN: 9798905610042