After the Crash: and other stories

David Pickford’s After the Crash and other stories is a collection of nine short stories that will take you from The Door to the River to the wildest reaches of the Sahara In Jahannam’s Lair; on board Twenty Red Twenty, the first manned mission to Mars, and into the labyrinth of Cain and Abel’s psycho-drama in The End of the Past. Five of the stories compose a series of vividly descriptive episodes of mountain literature, where the perilous conditions of the adventurous life are explored and questioned, extreme skiers are tested to the limit, an alpinist suddenly finds himself marooned high in the Himalaya after a plane crash, the border between myth and reality is blurred during a long solo climb, and a tragic mystery is solved by a lone climber who reassembles the lost pieces of The Map of Thunder Canyon. The remaining four stories range from the visionary dreams of a child to the ideology of a Waziri jihadist. Controversial, poetic, melancholy, original and thought provoking, each story is revealed in just enough detail to let your imagination conceive what might happen next.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Jim Perrin; The Door to the River; The Map of Thunder Canyon; After the Crash; Children of the Air; The Cirque of the Unfallen; The Jahannam's Lair; The Last Exit from Hotel Noir; Twenty Red Twenty; The End of the Past; Acknowledgements.

About the Author :
David Pickford is a climber, photographer, writer and adventurer. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Climb, Britain's biggest climbing and mountaineering magazine. He was a professional climber for many years and is responsible for numerous first ascents of difficult rock climbs around the world, from the sea cliffs of England and Wales to the high mountains of Asia and Africa. David is one of the UK's leading adventure photographers and a widely-acclaimed writer and journalist. His work has appeared across an extensive range of media in Britain and the United States, including Esquire magazine (UK), Alpinist magazine (USA), Climb magazine (UK), Summit magazine, Robert Harding World Images, and on BBC Radio. When he is not away on global assignments, he is usually found pioneering a more direct route between his desk and the office door.

Review :
David Pickford’s writing is full of images of mirrors, half-lights, vanishing points and flashes of radiance. There are moments in his prose when a reader feels as if he’s tiptoeing on the threshold of some other, more visionary reality – beyond sight, words and thought. A hidden door in an overgrown garden; the whispering of indecipherable echoes; the reflection of starlight on snow; the mystery of what it means to be an adventurer, to be human and to be alive.