Mountains of the Moon

A woman in her thirties is released from prison, equipped with a new name and not much else. She moves to a bedsit in Bristol u an empty, cold room u and attempts to rebuild herself. From this beginning we witness sections of the woman's life and of her different identities at different times, replayed in parallel u a sequence of events she must fathom, if she is ever to rid herself of the burden of the past. Seven-year-old Lulu escapes the emotional and physical abuse of her mother's house for the scrubland nearby, a wilderness she finds is populated with dangers every bit as real as those she is fleeing. Teenage Catherine describes an adolescence of first love and a fragile stability in a grand 'Palice', a sanctuary that is short-lived. Beverly endures a wandering existence, forced, at every turn, to keep moving u sidestepping the villains she encounters, and taking them out, where necessary. Finally we find Kim betrayed, witness to a shocking crime, and forced into a desperate confession. Fragments from the woman's life intersect and overlap, reality and imagination become confused, and we follow her on a vivid and unpredictable journey from railway arches to the Ruwenzoris in Uganda, the real life Mountains of the Moon, and beyond u taking in encounters with deadly mushrooms, extinct butterflies, croupiers and child killers, piecing together the devastating account of somebody living outside society, without a safety net. Unsettling, hallucinatory, without precedent, Mountains of the Moon is a twisting and unforgettable book, an account of a broken life that, against the odds, amounts to something beautiful. It is the debut of a unique voice in contemporary fiction.