When I Sing, Mountains Dance is the English edition of Irene Solà’s Canto jo i la muntanya balla, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem.

A novel set in the Catalan Pyrenees, but not in the usual way. The mountain is not just the background. It speaks, remembers, hides, watches, changes. People speak too, but so do animals, storms, ghosts, mushrooms and the landscape itself.

It is a book about place, memory, violence, family, weather, death, language and everything that stays in a valley long after people have passed through it.

We recommend it because it sits very close to the way we like to think about the outdoors at Amunt. Not only as sport, performance or escape, but as culture. As something alive, uncomfortable, beautiful, strange and full of stories.

A book to read slowly, preferably somewhere outside.