Mick Brown

Sky Ladder

To A Mountain in Tibet

By

Chatto and Windus 227pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Before setting out on his journey to Mount Kailas in Tibet, the most sacred of the world’s mountains, holy to one-fifth of the earth’s people, Colin Thubron meets a monk named Tashi in Kathmandu who instructs him to dedicate his pilgrimage ‘to those who have died’ so that ‘they will accrue merit’.

‘They will?’ Thubron asks doubtfully. ‘Can you help the dead?’ His residual Anglicanism, he notes, offers no intercession or opportunity of consolation for those who have passed. ‘The dead were beyond reach or comfort.’

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The breadth of Clarke’s knowledge and experience, coupled to a conspicuous absence of pomposity, makes for easy an… ,
    • In this month's Silenced Voices, Lucy Popescu shines a light on Myanmar's persecution of writers and journalists, p… ,
    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    Follow Us