I read this book on a return visit to the 'auld country' - the first in almost thirty years. Scotland has certainly changed and so have her writers. Greig's writing blends that granite dourness of the male Scot with a lyrical beauty that is as haunting as it is unusual. The book form of the work is complex, with the reader having to assume different perspectives and try to appreciate different personalities. In particular, as a Scot who grew up in the sixties and left in the seventies, this work has a quality that is both familiar and strange. I can see much of myself and my contemporaries in these characters, however the writing is broad enough and distanced enough to allow for these introspection not to interfere with what is an excellent story.

I am really glad that I found this book and this writer. I have purchased other of his novels and have found his style consistently poetic and memorable. Beautiful writing... At a personal level, I found the use of Scots (which is not too daunting for the non-Scots speaker) just great! It was a powerful feeling to have that wonderful evocation of people and places that are so different and yet so familiar.

With people like Andrew Greig around I am very optimistic about the future of writing in Scotland. A really wonderfully crafted and skilfully executed book. If this is what has been happening in Scotland in the last thirty years I will make sure to come back sooner next time!

I love this book. It's a tough romance, about loyalty and friendship as much as passion and betrayal. It's set all over Scotland, from the Borders to the Orkney and Shetland isles, and in some way it's about the identity of the country as well as that of the central characters. It's got a great central woman, Kim - tough, fragile, committed in at least two senses - who really runs the show and creates these amazing artworks and display boxes. If you're interested in climbing, passionate love, being a parent or having them, landscape, loss and moments of beauty - this one's for you! I've read it so often and never tired of it.

Building a complex relationship among four main characters, Greig's book works perfectly. Using a wonderful method of revealing the past and the present in perfect symmetry, I found myself needing to know if Graeme lived or died, if the 'bairn' was his or Jimmy's. Or somebody else's entirely. The subtitle "a modern romance" cannot do this book justice, as it is a wonderful story of friends and lovers, more than romance and more than a modern tale. Read it...

I have just read this book after reading Greig's 'Electric Brae' - an exceptionally fine book. The story line of 'Where They Lay Bare' is complex and beautifully woven. It uses as a framework the ballads of the Border County, between Scotland and England. The narrative forces the reader to see events from multiple perspective (a feature of Greig's work) and there is a pervasive ambiguity as to voice, purpose and direction. There is a wide and convincing range of psychological and emotional states, needs and agendas. The effect is captivating, haunting and - for me at least - quite jarring and unsettling.

The evocation of the Scottish Borders is beautiful (I am an expatriate Scot), with a sustained lyrical and poetic language that is rich and memorable. The writing is exceptional. The story is carefully crafted with a great deal of mystery and violence just below the surface. There are twists and turns right up (as they say) to the very last page. A haunting and disturbing book that mirrors with remarkable detail the emotional complexities and depths of the Border ballad while maintaining a terse vigour. Greig has crafted an exceptional work and demonstrated once again his well deserved status in contemporary literature.

This is a wonderful book. I greatly enjoyed reading it and I'm about to read another of Greig's books (That Summer). He is a remarkable writer. Personally, the rich use of Scots (which should not deter the non-Scots speaker) was evocative and enriching. It is exciting to see that this quality of lyrical and creative literature is coming out of the 'auld country'. I highly recommend this book.

This book is the best novel I have read for a long time. It reads like poetry, with not a word out of place: the story line is gripping, and now, days after having finished it, the characters are still all running around in my head, refusing to go away. Beautiful and spellbinding, I'd recomend it to anyone.

The style reminds me a little of Janet Turner Hospital--another author I admire.

This is an astonishing long poem, comparable only to Ed Dorn's 'Gunslinger'. It's a Quest poem, in this case for a healing blade. The characters are fragmented pieces of a whole person, plus a mysterious and mischevious Buddha (also known as 'The Bear' and the reader. It's hilarious, lyrical, ridiculous, serious. Set in Scotland, Kathmundu, Cambridge and Morocco, with things to say about all of them. And have fun spotting the many many quotations and misquotations buried in the text - what the author calls 'sampling'. I tell you, this book is as much fun as poetry gets!

Greig has an incredible facility with language - he's actually a poet - and this, like his earlier book, The Electric Brae is beautifully and fluently crafted.

In contrast to his first novel, it's a much lighter more entertaining read set in the Scottish Highlands and harking back to John Buchan's original. Not massively serious, but what used to be called a damn good yarn.

If you want something with bigger, darker teeth try the Electric Brae. It doesn't seem to be listed on amazon.com, but it should be at amazon.co.uk and is simply one of the most amazing books I've read, full stop.

This is an epic yarn, set in the Highlands of Scotland. It makes great summer reading and is full of good escapades. It is a fitting tribute to those that inspired this tale - whose lives were always filled with adventure or dreams of it.

This is a wonderful read if you're a bit down and bored. That's how the central characters feel until they take on the poaching wager from John Buchan's book 'John Macnab' and decide to do it for real. Very soon they're twigged by the wonderful Kirsty, an alarming, irresistible, inventive character on the run from her past. Then the action really starts. It's all set in three Scottish Highland estates, including the Royal one at Balmoral. The writer clearly knows his highlands, and poaching, and the hearts of men and women. It's exhilarating, uplifting, way beyond any pastiche of the rather stiff and dates Buchan yarn. In fact, it's an affectionate critique of it. Read this and join the adventure!

The beginning was so confusing I couldn't keep who was talking straight. The change of view should have been more obvious. Of course the ending was unexpected but not a total surprise. The descriptions were very good of the fighting and the landscape. I was dissapointed.

I found this book in Scotland last fall with the title "That Summer", so I wasn't aware that it was available in the US.
The story is a bit slow to get started. It isn't clear at first that we have two narrator/characters plus an omniscient narrator. I set the book done several times before it finally gripped me & I had to finish it in the middle of the night.

Greig tries to make us understand what it was like to live with uncertainty, fear, love, & death from moment to moment. The characters seem to be discovering themselves as we watch. Len & Stella examine every feeling as it occurs. This may sound tedious, but it illuminates what I find most interesting about WWII. I want to understand how people felt, how life looked to them. I am not interested in planes or tactics, although I understand that many are. Far more interesting to me are the secrets of the human heart. WWII, and the Battle of Britain in this story, brought out the best & the worst in people. Len & Stella confront the hate, love, grief, & joy that is part of life. They find their love for each other as they learn to face all these emotions.
"The Clouds Above" is like a tightrope act. Will the characters survive? They face danger all the way as we hope & pray that they will make it to the other side.

I was born (barely) while World War II was still being fought. And, even though it was over two months later, to my parents' generation it was the defining event and I grew up in its shadow. The Battle of Britain, especially, was a David-and-Goliath story to make my heart pound: the exploits of the Royal Air Force, the grim courage of the civilian population, the small beleaguered island nation against the Nazi war machine. What a drama.

Although THE CLOUDS ABOVE has all the suspense and pathos you'd expect from a novel set in those legendary days, it also goes deeper, giving a real sense of what it was like to be alive then. It evokes not only the outer signposts of a country under siege (the constant danger, profound fatigue, late trains, rationed food) but its inner landscape --- for this book, as its subtitle suggests, is a romance. Drawing on the wartime diaries of his mother, who was a nurse, Andrew Greig alternates between two voices: Len Westbourne, a young RAF pilot and Stella Gardam, a WAAF radar operator trained to spot enemy aircraft. The device makes sense both structurally and emotionally. We get the queasy normality of life on the ground versus the dizzy, sped-up horror of aerial battles. We get middle-class, university-educated, initially snobbish Stella versus gangly country boy Len, whose father works in a factory. And we get the slow, unbearably sweet progress of their love, which they first resist as too big a risk (the RAF was not known for its long lifespans), until the war makes them see that no longer is anything safe nor is there any reason to hold back.

The war in this novel is more than a conflict --- it is an enormous catalyst for change. "One day there may be a generation without a great war," Stella thinks. "What will they do then to know themselves?" Adolescent habits and attachments fall away as planes are shot down, radar huts bombed and dance halls blown to smithereens. Conventions and social divisions loosen and totter --- Stella makes friends with Maddy Phillps, an ebullient if "unrespectable" charmer and with her "posh" sergeant, Foxy Farringdon (perfect teeth, perfect nails, country house, upper-class drawl). Len draws close to a Pole serving in the RAF, Tadeusz, a bitter, tragic figure whose country has already fallen victim to Hitler. The pilots, in fact, form a club more select than any elite London establishment.

Both of them try not to become morally numb --- Len agonizes over what it means to kill, while Stella imagines a young Fraulein at a radar screen on the other side of the Channel. They struggle to live and, at the same time, prepare to die, recognizing finally that this contradiction is the human condition, not just a byproduct of war. "How can we love anyone in wartime?" Stella thinks as she and Len ride back on the train from a week's leave in the country. "It's too stupid. Then I looked round the train . . . and saw that everyone on it was going to die, sooner or later. How can we love in the face of that? Then again, how can we not? Wartime is like real life but more so."

Part of the "more so" is that war tends to knock out both past and future; life is experienced mostly in the present tense. To reflect this immediacy, Greig tells his story in short bursts, moment by moment. Some of them are unspeakable (Stella's coworker lying dead after a raid; Len blowing off a Luftwaffe pilot's head), while others are extraordinarily joyful. One summer day, Len and Stella picnic by the river and she swims naked. They have begun to allow themselves to think of marriage and children. Len imagines that he may survive; Stella, in an act of faith and hope, makes love without contraceptives. At least for the afternoon, they snatch back the future that the war has stolen from them.

Greig is a poet as well as a novelist (THE CLOUDS ABOVE is the first of his books to be published in this country) and it shows. This is a beautifully written novel, with a fresh, unsentimental use of language that feels natural to the story. It is as if the intensity of war and love awakens both Stella and Len to a fierce lyricism they might not have otherwise achieved. "I still loved flying, that was something," Len thinks. "That lift as I came unstuck from the earth again. The sense of dreamy freedom, for all the noise, as I watched dabs of clouds passing by beneath, and below them the green fields, roads, and farmhouses, as we set our course for War." Or Stella: "Len's youth and vulnerability and kisses had dragged the heart out of me, and it lay so open I wondered if it couldn't be seen beating in the moonlight."

THE CLOUDS ABOVE received excellent reviews, but it hasn't been talked about much. It should be. Get this glorious book. Read it and give it to friends. It will break your heart and also make it soar.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

This is a very accessible account of a second British attempt to summit Everest via the North East ridge organized by Malcolm Duff in 1985. A previous attempt in 1982 led by Chris Bonington (see Everest: The Unclimbed Ridge by Chris Bonington for more information about that attempt) had resulted in the tragic loss of two climbers, Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman. Since the author of the book, Andrew Greig, had only recently begun climbing, we are intiated into the inner world of the British mountaineering society at almost the same time that he is being initiated. This account focuses on the inter-relations among the diverse personalities of the climbers recruited for this attempt. In addition, to the authors first hand accounts and summaries of the various stages involved in organizing an expedition of this magnitude, we are given numerous journal entries from the other participants. I feel that this is an important dimension that is not always found in other books of this type. Typically, books on mountaineering are written by a single author even though numerous individuals have been involved in the climb. In this book, we are not limited to the author's opinion of how some of the other members were affected. Rather we can understand how they responded to the demands being placed on them in their own words. Another interesting aspect deals with how this diverse group of people come together to work as a team and how they are haunted by the memory of Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman. While no one in this group summited, personal bests for highest point attained were set by most of the participants. For those that climbed into the Death Zone (see Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and The Death Zone by Matt Dickinson), there was the realization that they were able to function at that level without supplemental oxygen. The book is very enjoyable and accessible. The commercialization of Everest has become a much debated topic since the tragic events of 1996 (again, see Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer). This book shows us what Everest was like prior to the hand-held guided tours that seem to be so favorable today.

The idea behind Summit Fever sounds promising - a writer with no climbing experience is invited to join a Himalayan expedition. Andrew Greig is given a few lessons on winter technique in Scotland and then it's off to the Karakoram with a motley crew of climbers and trekkers to tackle the Mustagh Tower, but money problems and discord nearly wreck the trip. There's enough here for a really good book, but the author quickly loses his writer's perspective in a growing desire to fit in with the 'bin-men'. I found the endless use of mid-80's British climbing scene slang tiresome (it's in almost every conversation once Andrew Greig reaches base camp), and instead of observing the climbers, Greig tries to think and feel the way they do, which tends to defeat the whole point of having a non-climber write about climbing. There are some highlights though, especially early on in the book when everything is a fresh experience for the author, and he sees the climbers through the eyes of a sympathetic and observant outsider.

Imagine yourself, arm chair climber that you invariably are, being invited by a well respected mountaineer to join an expedition to the Karakoram Himalayas to write a book about the experience. What would you do?

Well, if you are like Andrew Greig, notwithstanding lack of climbing experience, you find the invitation hard to resist, especially since the mountaineer who invites you, Mal Duff, is personally willing to put you through the paces on some of the local peaks to help you get into the groove of climbing. Before you know it, you find yourself on expedition in the Karakoram Himalayas headed to the Mustagh Tower.

This book is the author's account of how he found himself on a high altitude climbing expedition, what he did to train and get in shape for it, what he did when he got there, and what his perceptions were, as a former arm chair climber, of the expedition experience and climbing at high altitude.

His account is gritty, realistic, and he tells it the way he sees it, warts and all. Well written, it celebrates the roller coaster existence of being on a real live adventure ride that is the lot of expeditioners everywhere.

A wonderfull account of all the different perspectives on climbing by different people. Beautifully written, witty and a story that takes you right there. One feels part of the whole expedition, just as if sitting by the radio. As a reader you feel that you know the climbers and get to care about all of them. A moving introduction by Joe Simpson also adds to the book. It made me all feel alive.

Imagine yourself, armchair climber that you invariably are, being invited by a well respected mountaineer to join an expedition to the Karakoram Himalayas to write a book about the experience. What would you do?

Well, if you are like Andrew Greig, notwithstanding lack of climbing experience, you find the invitation hard to resist, especially since the mountaineer who invites you, Mal Duff, is personally willing to put you through the paces on some of the local peaks to help you get into the groove of climbing. Before you know it, you find yourself on expedition in the Karakoram Himalayas headed to the Mustagh Tower.

This book is the author's account of how he found himself on a high altitude climbing expedition, what he did to train and get in shape for it, what he did when he got there, and what his perceptions were, as a former arm chair climber, of the expedition experience and climbing at high altitude.

His account is gritty, realistic, and he tells it the way he sees it, warts and all. Well written, though narrow in scope, it celebrates the roller coaster existence of being on a real live adventure ride that is the lot of expeditioners everywhere.