LRTPublicityLouise Rhind-Tutt

Fiva: An Adventure That Went Wrong is the epic true account from Gordon Stainforth of a near-death experience on a mountain in Norway in 1969. That summer, as Apollo 11 was blasting off to the moon, Gordon and John Stainforth, two teenage twin brothers with only three years’ mountaineering experience, set off to climb one of the highest rock faces in Europe.

With just two bars of chocolate, some sandwiches, a four-sentence route description and an old sketch map, they left their tent early one morning with the full expectation of being back in time for tea. Within a few hours things had gone badly wrong, they were looking death in the face, and the English Home Counties seemed very far away...

“Wonderful, nostalgic, gripping, classic epic yarn with great humour, deserves to win many many awards - read it” Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void.

Alternately humourous and nerve-shredding, visceral, fast-paced, gripping and at times incredibly touching, Fiva captures the hope, love, terror and despair of climbing and has been likened to Joe Simpson’s best-selling Touching the Void.

Gordon Stainforth’s career has encompassed philosophy at Cardiff University; working in films - most memorably with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining; and mountain photography where he has won numerous awards for his books: Eyes to the Hills, which won the 1992 Thomas Cook Illustrated Travel Book Award; and The Cuillin, which won the 1994 Banff Mountain Book Festival Best Book of Mountain Image and the Outdoor Writers’ Guild Award for Excellence.He recently appeared in Griff Rhys Jones’s BBC TV series Mountains.