If you're in the mood for a ghost story, I'd highly recommend Michelle Paver's Dark Matter (post on it here and report on the author's appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival here), and now her Thin Air. She is an excellent storyteller, getting on with the job in a brisk, economical manner, creating atmosphere, placing facts, playing out her plots in an instinctive but extremely well-informed manner with a sound grasp of pacing and detail, and an analyst's feel for what's important, when it's important, and why.
In Thin Air we're with a 1935 expedition attempting to be the first to reach the summit of Kangchengjunga, the third highest mountain in the world and one of the most dangerous. The men are following the route taken by a 1906 team led by General Sir Edmund Lyell whose account of his expedition, Bloody but Unbowed, is required reading for the later group of which our narrator, Stephen Pearce, is team doctor. But it's to Captain Charles Tennant, now the only surviving member of that earlier attempt, albeit the one who has never spoken of his ordeal, to whom Stephen goes for advice on the route, only to be warned off in no uncertain terms - except it seems that there's more to Tennant's antipathy than a simple fear for Stephen's safety.
Undaunted, Stephen and his companions, who include his elder brother Kits, set off from Darjeeling, trekking to the mountain with their native porters. The sherpas, however, are naturally superstitious and particularly uncomfortable about following in dead men's footsteps, for of the 1906 group, only Lyell and Tennant made it off Kangchengjunga alive, and adopting their route and camp sites is in the sherpas' view to court disaster.
What follows is a perfectly judged study of sibling rivalry, of derring-do, and of psychological disorientation caused by altitude, conditions, and "the shark's fin of the past jutting into the present". It is, like Dark Matter, a genuinely unsettling page-turner, with a highly convincing account of the characters' back-story and future lives to book-end their present utterly chilling jeopardy.
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