Michelle Paver's descriptions of Himalayan mountain-climbing are terrifyingly lifelike - the lashing winds, glittering ice: you can see it all...Paver's style is lively and clear; and the tale just rips along...Just fantastic -- Wendy Holden * DAILY MAIL * Michelle Paver climbs the heights with a tale of horrors… stark and gnawing tale of horrors lurking at the limits of human endurance and beyond. If you enjoyed Dark Matter, you won’t be disappointed this follow-up” Stephen's fraught relationship with his brother Kits, was one of the main conflicts of the story. Besides Stephen, and sometimes Major Cotterell, I didn't like any of the white members of the expedition. They were either driven by greed and pride or cowardly in the face of injustice or common sense. It gave me a smug sense of satisfaction when Kits received his just desserts.

As Stephen continues, his attitude towards Lyell changes, and as he re-reads his words as a grown-up, the more pompous and misguided his mission sounds. Stephen is also dealing with a recent break-up that saw him leave his partner weeks before marriage and a strained relationship with his older brother, which cunningly leaves you questioning his state of mind.This book is guaranteed to give you chills! Don't read it just before going to bed... * MARTIN BELCHER blog * What do I mean by wrong? Well I don’t mean ghosts. Not in the sense of disembodied spirits, I don’t believe in them. […] But energy, now. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so isn’t it at least possible that some kind of energy—perhaps magnetic, or even some force of emotion—may have lingered here for years? And perhaps—perhaps there’s something about me that makes me a sort of physical medium for that energy: like a battery, or a lightning rod?

Some reviewers have remarked on the similarity between Thin Air and Dark Matter - there are certainly similarities between the two books but that didn't matter to me - this is a genre work and if the main elements are not broken, why fix them! If you liked Dark Matter, you should love Thin Air. Author's press release (8 August 2009). "Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Sells A Million Copies!". Booktrade.info. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 . Retrieved 6 February 2011. {{ cite web}}: |author= has generic name ( help) The book transports the reader into cold, inimical terrain, forcing them to question the evidence of their over-stimulated senses * METRO *Perhaps that’s what we find frightening,” Stephen suggests. “Being on a mountain forces us to confront the vast, unsentient reality that’s always present behind our own busy little human world.” When we go into the wild, we are in the presence of something which seems to be immortal. The earth itself is a kind of memento mori. It was there before us and will remain long after we’re gone. Our own insignificance is the most terrifying thing we can be shown. In short, prepare to be scared. But it’d be a grave mistake to go into Thin Air expecting a standard supernatural narrative. What horror there is here is tied primarily to the characters: to Stephen and Kits and their struggle to survive in a landscape where almost nothing does; and to the climbers that tried and tragically failed to conquer Kangchenjunga both before and after the brothers at this book’s breast. I was especially impressed with Paver's ability to describe different aspects of the mountain's structure without making me yawn with boredom. There’s terror on a grander scale in Thin Air, Michelle Paver’s second foray into the ghost story genre. Set in 1935, the novel is narrated by Dr Stephen Pearce, one of five men chosen for an expedition to conquer Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, the world’s third highest mountain. The party, led by Major Cotterell, “every boy’s ideal of a mountaineer”, comprises the dour, Presbyterian McLellan; Garrard, “a parlour Socialist”; and Kits, Stephen’s older brother, with whom he has a somewhat strained and rivalrous relationship.