10 great books about mountains that have nothing to do with climbing

The shortlist for this year’s Boardman Tasker Prize was announced this month, and once again five out of six books on the shortlist are about climbing. You can be certain that the winner will be one of the five.

This is not surprising for a prize in memory of two climbing greats, but it’s disappointing for an award whose aim is to ‘promote literature by providing an annual award to authors of literary works, the central theme of which is concerned with the mountain environment’ (a sentence th...