Points of Astonishment

In the new and previously uncollected stories that make up Points of Astonishment, Stevenson follows through on the promise of his Letters from Chamonix, winner of the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction and Poetry. These eight short stories describe the fates of their fictional climbers on stages as intimate as their own living room and as vast and unforgiving as the remote Himalaya. Stevenson stirs up a mix of humanity, language, and mountainous terrain and lays bare the answers to the question every fiction writer asks: what if? In the words of Katie Ives, long-time editor of Alpinist and author of Imaginary Peaks, ". . . one of the great prose stylists of modern climbing literature."