Solo Faces by James Salter

Verne Rand is a born climber, a man so at ease on tricky ascents that it’s as if he’s part of the mountains. He’s the fascinating (fictional) character at the heart of Solo Faces, a book written in the third person but focusing more on the opinions of those around Rand than on Rand himself. As such, Rand is hard to know – but we start to empathise with his obsession with climbing early on, in this reissued novel from James Salter. The book is about this obsession, and how Rand’s passion for the mountains evolves after he becomes inadvertently famous. It’s beautifully written, using concise, nuanced sentences as deliberate as a climber’s movements to gradually build a plot underneath with enjoyable passages describing landscapes and climbs. If there was ever a book that could make people want to risk their lives scaling peaks, it’s this one. Most, however, would settle for finding more well-constructed books by James Salter. [Ryan Agee]