A Romance of Wastdale

A man returns from the Alps to find his fiancée in the house of a friend, and the mountain and the marriage are settled in a single night. A. E. W. Mason wrote this early, before The Four Feathers, and it is his tightest book: two hundred pages, four people, and a climbing accident that may not be one. The Wastdale rock is described by someone who had been on it. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Constable and Grimshaw turn the Lake District light, weather and water that shape the night on Wastdale rock into a visual counterpart.