A true testament to the human will and spirit. Joe Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates both showed great courage and strength after Simpson fell and broke his leg descending Siula Grande but it is Simpson’s harrowing account of what happened to him and how against all the odds he got himself back to base camp that will leave the reader in awe and complete admiration. An intense and totally engrossing read.
Listen to an audio extract by clicking on the orange arrow below.
Joe Simpson with just his partner, Simon Yates tackled the unclimbed West Face of the remote 21, 000 ft SIULA GRANDE in the Peruvian Andes. In June 1995 they achieved the summit before disaster struck. A few days later, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frost-bitten, to tell their non-climbing companion that Joe was dead. For three days he wrestled with guilt as they prepared to return home. Then a cry in the night took them out torches, where they found Joe, badly injured, crawling through the snowstorm in a delirium. Far from causing Joe's death, Simon had paradoxically saved his friend's life. What happened, and how they dealt with the psychological traumas that resulted when Simon was forced into the appalling decision to cut the rope, makes not only an epic of survival but a compelling testament of friendship.
Joe Simpson is the author of several best-selling books, of which the first, Touching the Void, won both the NCR Award and the Boardman Tasker Award. His later books are This Game of Ghosts, Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, The Beckoning Silence and a novel The Water People. Since its first publication in 1988, Touching the Void has become a classic and an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages and made into an award-winning feature-length documentary film (winner of the Outstanding British Film of the Year BAFTA 2004). Joe currently lives in Sheffield.
