The Living Mountain is like no other book I've read before. It's a poetic homage to The Cairngorm mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland. "Poetic homage" sounds very dramatic, but the book really is just that. Written in the late 1940s, during the last years of the second world war, The Cairngorms were Nan Shepherd's safe place during these turbulent, unpredictable years. It's a piece of nature writing that reads like a poetry, but it's also a philosophical text,