There is no way Nan Shepherd could have predicted its success, nor the uncommon staying power, of the book she had stowed away in a drawer for decades. After a quiet release in 1977, The Living Mountain became a surprise sensation in the United Kingdom after Canongate reissued it, three decades after her death, in 2011. A newcomer to the text, too, might be surprised by such enduring allure. In this age of focus groups and studio notes, conventional wisdom suggests that broad appeal is made through similarly broad strokes: universally relatable content in which there’s something for everyone. And yet The Living Mountain is about a specific set of mountains in northeast Scotland that many readers will never have visited.
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