Winner of the 2006 Boardman Tasker Award

This is the most detailed and convincingly thought out account so far, of what happened on Mallory’s last climb on Everest. The events of what actually occurred on that final summit assault in 1924, Sir Chris Bonington has called mountaineering’s greatest mystery.

Mallory himself described a climb as a spiritual journey: ‘To struggle and to understand – never the last without the other’. And this is a profound recreation of that struggle, the journey to understand during the climb, set within a meticulously researched narrative. The reader is taken in the stream of Mallory’s consciousness, into and through a vivid reliving of the detail of the climb itself, that leads into the heart and soul of Mallory himself. From his earliest childhood memory to moving recollections of the Somme – up to the realisation of the dream – the summit of Mt. Everest – it is as much a meditation on the paths of glory and the changeling nicknamed Free Will, as about the why of climbing and its wild joy – ‘the ecstasy that thrills the blood’.

It is an elegy – the Big Hill seen in the light of the country churchyard at Stoke Poges – and a paean to the early days of climbing – to the great pioneers of the Golden & Silver Ages. Described as a tour de force – it is haunting and unforgettable – an epic narrative. In the words of Stephen Venables: ‘a magnificent poem … beautiful … and incredibly moving.'