The Hidden Fires

LoveReading Says

Refreshing, stimulating, and encouraging, this is an absorbing read with the mountains throwing arms wide open in welcome. I love the way Merryn Glover writes, she invites you in to experience the full gamut of unexpected emotions. I’ve read her novel Of Stone and Sky where a Highland shepherd goes missing and she evoked the most beautiful sense of place with her descriptions. In my personal life I love to experience nature, so when I saw that she was writing a non-fiction book about the Cairngorm mountains I just had to accompany her. Here, she writes with the celebrated Nan Shepherd in mind, author of The Living Mountain. Forgive me, but I’d not read Nan Shepherd’s work before this point, nor had I walked in the Cairngorms and was unsure how that would affect my read, however both were so beautifully introduced to me that I now have to further explore the book and mountains too. Merryn Glover tells us: “The Hidden Fires is an account of my pilgrimage deeper into the Cairngorms and my own sense of being, with Nan Shepherd as invisible friend: walking guide, writing tutor and fellow wonderer”. As Nan was her guide, so Merryn became mine. She encourages you not only to search inside yourself, but also to look beyond the obvious self-gratification of exploring nature, to really see, feel, to: “transcend the self”. She visits people who work in the mountains, wildlife experts and watchers, explores the threat of humans to the mountains and conversely of the mountains to unprepared wandering humans, the healing of land with regeneration projects and much more. She talks of life and death, fear and joy, in other words this is about so much more than the Cairngorms but the focus is the mountains, is the essence of what can be discovered there. A LoveReading Star Book, The Hidden Fires is a rare beauty, where the place and sense of self is revealed and celebrated in all its blazing glory and wonder.

Liz Robinson

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