Taking Leave - Softcover

Hubank, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940777429 ISBN 13: 9781940777429

Publisher: Sentinel Rock Press, 2014

Synopsis

Fleeing from an imprisoning job and a disintegrating marriage, Anthony Hardman seeks refuge in a remote house on the edge of a lonely moor. Here, set free by the liberating expanses of sky and rock, he begins to discover the co-existence of past and present, and the strangeness of remembered experience, in the re-awakening of the bold young climber he once was, finding his fulfillment among the limestone crags and gritstone edges. Darker memories, long suppressed, emerging from his buried self, compel him to re-examine the breakdown of relations with his wife, Elizabeth. Through his friendship with a shepherd and his family, above all with a feral child, he begins to understand what has been lacking in his life. Meanwhile, as he and Elizabeth struggle to come to terms with the unfinished business of their marriage, a catastrophe is looming which will have tragic consequences. Set among the hills and crags of the Peak District, Roger Hubank’s novel explores the nature of the “self”, its relationship with the sustaining energies of the earth, and the claims of other lives.

About this title

About the Author

Roger Hubank is a prize winning novelist whose work is largely devoted to exploring risk-taking in a wilderness of one kind or another. His first book, North Wall, an evocation of an epic climb on one of the great north faces of the Alps, was described by the critic Al Alvarez as “a genuine and moving work of imagination on a subject where true imagination is usually the one quality never found.” Then came Hazard’s Way, set in the English Lake District. It was acclaimed by Jim Perrin as “quite simply a masterpiece – the finest piece of fictional writing about the subject of mountaineering ever to have been published in this country.” It won the Boardman Tasker Prize, the Grand Prix at the Banff Mountain Book Festival, and a special commendation from the Royal Society of Literature. North, about a disastrous nineteenth-century American Arctic expedition, won a Special Jury award at the Banff Festival, and was praised in The Observer as “perhaps the first great historical novel of the twenty-first century.” Taking Leave, his fourth novel, was written as a tribute to his native Derbyshire moors and the people who make their living there. “Its lyrical evocations of place,” said the Alpine Journal, “urge on the reader a sense of a living presence, akin to the omnipresent landscape in the work of Thomas Hardy.” His latest book, Evening Light, has been hailed by leading Himalayan mountaineer Stephen Venables as “that rare treat – a good climbing novel.” A rock-climber and mountaineer since the 1960’s Roger Hubank has climbed extensively in Britain and the Alps. His work has been published in the United States, in Spain, and has appeared in various editions in the UK. A former Lecturer in English Literature at Loughborough University, he holds degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sentinel Rock Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1940777429
• ISBN 13: 9781940777429
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296