Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"An image comes into my mind of me trapped like a piece of garbage in the middle of an endless rock wall. Here in this space between heaven and earth I live isolated, alone."
Quite simply my favourite book of the year. A bold statement I know, but I've waited a whole year for this second volume of five to come out, due to a delay in the translation. I know it's a year because customer Thomas Ranshaw, being one of the customers I eulogised about the first volume to when it came out initially, pointed out he bought that volume particular volume on his way home for Christmas last year. I've even pestered our contact at the publisher from time to time during 2010 for status updates, chuckling because he too was desperate to read the next instalment as well. It was worth the wait. In this volume we learn even more of the complex, intertwined back-histories of obsessed mountaineer Jouji Habu and his rival Tsuneo Hase, as the photographer Fukamachi plans his return to Kathmandu to relocate what may be George Mallory's camera, which could finally reveal if he was the first man to conquer Everest, long before Edmund Hillary. Storytelling at its finest.
