This one is worth a read for all the thriller reasons and all the outdoor adventure reasons. Reading BREATHLESS, you’ll be full of anticipation, appreciative of effort and training, more than a little apprehensive, then cold, cold, cold. You’ll be tired, ploddingly determined, and uneasy, chilled even inside your down jacket. You’ll be guessing madly, desperately, and wondering if your own eyes and oxygen-starved mind are playing tricks.

Journalist Cecily Wong, a British–Asian reporter for Wild Outdoors magazine, risks all her savings on a bid to summit Manaslu in Nepal, the eighth-highest peak in the world, in order to get a career-making interview with mountaineer Charles McVeigh. The small expedition will take a month or so, needing to acclimatise to the high altitude and do some serious training. People die in the Himalayan mountains. Every year.  

Cecily starts worrying about how often a climber dies, given she was invited although her blog was about her tragic climbing failure.  Charles McVeigh, the golden boy of the extreme sport, intends to summit Manaslu as his fourteenth peak over 8,000m not using oxygen or fixed ropes. This is called Alpine climbing and he can still bring his own ropes and fix them himself. Extreme travel vlogger Elise Gauthier is a popular French woman, who contends that male mountaineers were happy to use arranged safety supports until women started keeping up with them. Elise was one of my favourite characters.  

Charles, annoyingly, deliberately joins the expedition with only a short time to go. Cecily has been using the time to learn about Nepal and the stocky, brave, talented Sherpas such as Mingma and Galden who risk their lives to guide mountaineers. In charge of the expedition is Doug Manners, who isn’t much for the internet and is therefore unimpressed by anything except climbing ability. Every inch of effort will be needed, every tip for survival, as Cecily becomes gradually convinced that someone among the climbers is responsible for deaths. And that’s before she even gets near the death zone, where just sitting still long enough will kill you from lack of oxygen.

Author Amy McCulloch tells it as only someone who has been there can. Raised in Canada, she was the youngest Canadian woman to climb Mt Manaslu when she reached the summit in 2019. BREATHLESS is a cracker of a read. Grab your ice axe before you start.

Book Summary