I just love this book. Everything about it is nearly perfect... hugely enjoyable and brilliantly sustained.

An amazing book about mountain climbing from 1956. Laugh-out-loud literature

This wonderfully funny parody of adventure stories was first written in the 1950s but is just as fresh today with a truly brilliant comic narrator whose commentary on the expedition members is unintentionally hilarious. Buy it

Wonderful. Rum Doodle does for mountaineering what Three Men in a Boat did for Thames-going or Catch-22 did for the Second World War. It is simply an account of the leader of an expedition up Rum Doodle, a 40,000 and a half foot peak in the Himalayas, in the same way that Scoop is simply a tale about newsgathering in Africa. The tone is nearer to Pooter than anyone else I can think of, but the flavour is all W.E. Bowman's own

This gentle, deadly parody of the tight-arsed old school of British exploration narratives is seemingly a cult book among mountaineers, but it has been virtually unknown to the reading public since its first publication in 1956

A veritable feast... incredibly enjoyable... a marvellous romp

A hilarious spoof and perfect parody of Britishness...it shames what now claims to be comedy

A fine meditation on love and loss

Mankell carefully maps the changing seasons in beautifully stark prose

The cool, enigmatic tone is reminiscent of Paul Auster

Vivid prose...translated beautifully

Present a spare tale of metaphors and symbols to argue that, in the middle of life, we are in death but occasionally, and happily, the opposite too