A Line Above the Sky: On Mountains and Motherhood

Description

A stunning memoir of motherhood and mountaineering by one of Britain's most gifted poets, for readers of H is for Hawk and The Outrun. Climbing gives you the illusion of being in control, just for a while, the tantalising sense of being able to stay one move ahead of death. Helen Mort has always been drawn to the thrill and risk of climbing- the tension between human and rockface, and the climber's powerful connection to the elemental world. But when she becomes a mother for the first time, she finds herself re-examining her relationship with both the natural world and herself, as well as the way the world views women who aren't afraid to take risks. A Line Above the Sky melds memoir and nature writing to ask why humans are drawn to danger, and how we can find freedom in pushing our limits. It is a visceral love letter to losing oneself in physicality, whether climbing a mountain or bringing a child into the world, and an unforgettable celebration of womanhood in all its forms.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning is her first novel.

A gorgeous memoir all about the great outdoors and the impulse to go to our limits * Evening Standard * This is a wonderful book - exhilarating and taut, fearless in its explorations of wildness, risk, motherhood, and the inner and outer worlds of the writer. It will make you want to get out into the mountains, and to get back home in one piece. A triumph. * Jon McGregor * An intimate take on motherhood and self-dissolution, and the way mountains can come to fill the voids of a life * Economist * Deeply moving * New Statesman * This book is beautiful. I could read Helen Mort all day long...The book sang to me on many levels. It's spirited, visceral, earthy, defiant...A book I will re-read, and talk about, and pass on. * Emma Jane Unsworth * Strong stuff, satisfying and intriguing to read -- Sarah Moss * Irish Times * This is a book of the seen and unseen; on being alive; on being wild; on being a woman. This book is about being a woman - both seen and unseen - alive and wild - in a world that needs new words for every single part of this. And my oh my, how Mort writes those new words. * Caught by the River *