Among the Summer Snows

A celebration of summer snowbeds and a meditation on their significance. 

‘A beautiful book about love and loss, fragility and chance, the wide world and the near world . . . full of intense light and colour, extraordinary glimpses, moving insights and subtle humour.’

Richard Kerridge, author of Cold Blood

Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize

As the summer draws to a close, a few snowbeds – some as big as icebergs – survive in the Scottish Highlands. Christopher Nicholson’s Among the Summer Snows is both a celebration of these great, icy relics and an intensely personal meditation on their significance. A book to delight all those interested in mountains and snow, full of vivid description and anecdote, it explores the meanings of nature, beauty and mortality in the twenty-first century.

Praise for Among the Summer Snows:

‘Strange, beautiful, eerie and unique, this is the best mountain book I’ve read in years’

Trail magazine

 

‘A startlingly beautiful book . . . Mortality, aesthetic beauty, deep time and loss are themes never far from the surface in this exquisitely written book . . . Among the Summer Snows is at once haunting, moving, silent, and profoundly beautiful.’

Alex Roddie, The Great Outdoors

 

‘A glorious little book.’

Michael Kerr, Daily Telegraph

 

‘Nicholson made me laugh and cry within just a few pages . . . left me humbled as he revealed a range of other interconnected wonders I never knew about . . . a wrong-footing marvel of a book.’

David Robinson, Books from Scotland

 

‘Beautifully written, it is both elegiac and optimistic, a meditation on life and death. The descriptions of the snow patches are wonderfully detailed, the determination involved in reaching them familiar to anyone who walks in the hills . . . Among the Summer Snows is, I think, destined to become a classic of mountain literature. Superb.’

Christopher Townsend, Outdoors.com

 

‘It’s the story of a personal journey triggered partly by grief, but it’s also a study in what nature, and getting out into nature, means to us all. Nicholson’s writing on wildlife, flora and the mountain environment is detailed and immediate’

Walkingworld.com

 

‘Lyrical and elegiac, this debut is a tender account of an unusual fascination with the remaining snows of the Scottish Highlands. Nicholson offers us a wry, self-aware take on the relationship between humans and the changed (and changing) natural world.’

Helen Mort, chair of Boardman Tasker Award judges

 

‘This ravishingly lovely book is about thought-snow, summer snow, flight, falling, stillness, memory, loss, mountains, Time, death, survival and everything in between. It is an intense scrutiny of minute worlds, a roaming gaze into the vastness of space, intimate, introspective and questioning.’

Keggie Carew, author of Dadland

Read an extract.

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The ebook is also available to buy from your favourite e-retailers.