Canongate Books

British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when he offers “field-note, memoir, natural history, and philosophical meditation,” but what Nan Shepherd’s tidy book really is is a love letter to her beloved Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. Her observations are as sharp the first fall frost, her words as clear as a high mountain stream. The “light is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity,” she writes. John Muir raptured over the Sierra, but Shepherd writes of the Cairngorms with mentholated coolness, and hers is the superior effort, at least when it comes to knowing the “essential nature” that she was seeking from the very first page.