Evening Light — Roger Hubank

The first Briton to climb all fourteen of the world's 8000 meter summits, George Hazard long ago sacrificed wife and child to his ambitions as a mountaineer. Returning from a trekking trip to take up a commission from his publishers, his truck goes off the road. Emerging from a coma he is confronted by his daughter, Calon, who he abandoned many years before. As father and daughter embark on a fraught relationship, Hazard discovers that Calon has found, in her in-laws, the family she needed. Drawn gradually, despite himself, into their domestic life he is forced to look on helplessly as they are caught up in a succession of personal calamities. Meanwhile, as Hazard continues to struggle with his autobiography, he discovers that the story of his life is inextricable from that of other lives. Finally, overwhelmed by a scandal erupting out of his past, he is forced to recognize that a man is forever what he has been at any time for others. And might, at any time, be called upon to answer for it. Evening Light asks those disturbing questions some mountaineers prefer to keep to themselves.