It's the Mountain Way is a coming-of-age story filled with suspense and memories of first love. Savannah Benjamin, born and raised in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, knew the ways of the mountain. She had only experienced the outside world from the books she read. But books couldn't teach her how first love felt, or explain why some people who seemed good were not always trustworthy. They didn't tell her that teenagers could be mean or unfriendly. These lessons she had to learn for herself. Set in 1983, marrying young was not unusual in the isolated hollows and villages of the mountains. At fourteen, Savannah was no longer a child, but not yet an adult. Her mother had married at fifteen, she wanted more for her daughter. Horace Jenks, the local moonshiner, had other plans for Savannah.

Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow’s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow’s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by “those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,” and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path, Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration.

Journalism professor Adam Colbert has come home to Albuquerque after a reporting career that took him all over the world. A nineteenth century adobe house with a mansard roof that he admired as a boy is now his home on Mountain Road. He loves the old neighborhood and the road that once connected Albuquerque with the Sandia Mountains. But some unwelcome new neighbors are the organizers of a twenty-week abortion ban initiative on the fall municipal election ballot. Adam’s journalism students write investigative stories about the initiative and its backers, which puts him in the crosshairs of a corrupt university regent who supports the anti-abortion campaign. Two women, one a young anti-fascist vagabond and the other a gorgeous and ambitious graduate student, enter his life and dramatically influence his political activism and his romantic experience.

Mystic, teacher, and therapist Dr Joseph Randolph Bowers reveals the secrets of solitary life, contemplation, and enlightenment. Like a master weaver and guru Dr Bowers teaches the reader how to experience relief from suffering and how to attain awakening in freedom, mindfulness, and true joy. Seekers on the way will want to learn how to create your own 'rule of life' and how to nurture life-long vow practices that grow with you and that match your values and aspirations. Be forewarned, this knowledge of the ages can change you forever. Made for the western mind this is a modern secular synergy of Christian, Franciscan, Buddhist, Hindu, Mi'kmaq First Nation, Science, and Zen traditions. 'Solitude Awakens: The Heart Forest Mountain Way' is like a modern Lotus Flower Sutra of the Bodhisattva of Compassion in a clear and practical wisdom.

In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

Edited and introductions by Roderick Watson. The Quarry Wood, although published well before Sunset Song, inhabits a similar world; the progress of its heroine could almost be the alternative story of a Chris Guthrie who did go to university. Compassionate and humorous, the grace and style of Shepherd’s prose is heightened by a superb ear for the vigorous language of the north-east. The Weatherhouse, Shepherd’s masterpiece, is an even more substantial achievement which belongs to the great line of Scottish fiction dealing with the complex interactions of small communities, and especially the community of women – a touching and hilarious network of mothers, daughters, spinsters and widows. It is also a striking meditation on the nature of truth, the power of human longing and the mystery of being. The third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, describes Jenny Kilgour’s coming of age as she has to choose between the kindly harshness of her grandfather’s life on a remote hill farm, and the vulgar and glorious energy of Bella Cassie, a local girl who left the community to pursue success as a singer, and has now returned to scandalise them all. The Living Mountain is a lyrical testament in praise of the Cairngorms. It is a work deeply rooted in Shepherd’s knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places. This is the first omnibus edition of Shepherd’s prose works – her sensitivity and powers of observation raise her work far above the status of regional literature and into the front rank of Scottish writing.

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT SELF-SABOTAGE. Why we do it, when we do it, and how to stop doing it-for good. Coexisting but conflicting needs create self-sabotaging behaviors. This is why we resist efforts to change, often until they feel completely futile. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our own way and into our potential. For centuries, the mountain has been used as a metaphor for the big challenges we face, especially ones that seem impossible to overcome. To scale our mountains, we actually have to do the deep internal work of excavating trauma, building resilience, and adjusting how we show up for the climb. In the end, it is not the mountain we master, but ourselves.