This Game Of Ghosts

Description

This is a sequel to "Touching the Void", which won the 1989 NCR Award for Non-fiction and the Boardman Tasker Award, and in which Simpson described a fall in the Himalayas which crippled and almost broke him. Forced to test his nerve he struggled on crutches to 20,000 feet on Pumori, only to hear the news of the death of yet one more friend in the mountains. In an attempt to find a catharsis for his confused emotions, he wrote this memoir of the signposts that have directed him since childhood to measure fear and embrace the unknown.

Joe Simpson is the author of several best-selling books, of which the first, Touching the Void, won both the NCR award and the Boardman Tasker Award. His later books are This Game of Ghosts - the sequel to Touching the Void - Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, The Beckoning Silence and one previous novel, The Water People.

"Simpson has a great way with words and his prose grips... A fascinating tale, wonderfully told" -- Ranulph Fiennes Sunday Times "This Game Of Ghosts is a strange, beautiful, bewildering and often very moving book... Simpson paints a warm, vivid picture of the climbing fraternity, and approaches a fusion of poetry and philosophy sometimes with his description of the impact on oneself of facing down the fear of dying; through this coming closer to understanding death, and thereby, joyously life" The List "His fame is not due to the incidents themselves so much as the brilliant way he writes about them. The result leaves an impression of total honesty and lets the intense excitement of the stories speak for themselves" Independent "This book is not so much about why we climb - Simpson can't answer that for himself, much less the rest of us - but why we take such risks for such fleeting rewards. Overall this is a great book - perhaps the most honest bit of climbing writing I have read" -- John Sherman Climbing "This is Simpson's rehabilitation. It is deeply honest, perplexed, confused, has no easy conclusions...This is not so much another climbing book as a psychological document, terrifying, challenging and extraordinary" Scotsman