Macfarlane triumphs in an extremely strong short-list of four that comprised Tobias Hill’s The Cryptographer (Faber), Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy (Faber) and Charlotte Mendelson’s Daughters of Jerusalem (Picador). Combining riveting memoir with glittering cultural history, Macfarlane tells the story of his fascination with the world’s mountainous regions, from his first looking into a copy of The Fight for Everest during a sleepless night at his grandparents’ Scottish home; this prompted “one of the reading binges that only the expanses of childhood time permit”, until he had devoured all he could find on the subject. As his book unfolds, he explores mountains in history, in geology, in art, as physical challenge and, above all, in “the alchemy of the imagination”; his singing prose should inspire even the most sofa-bound to take to the hills. The Sunday Times congratulates him on this masterly debut.

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