Books of 2022: Michael Duggan picks mountaineer Helen Mort's memoir, and more

Michael Duggan picks his books of 2022, a literary selection of memoir, essays, Anglo-Saxon traditions and the biography of a renowned Cork bishop

Poet and mountaineer Helen Mort’s ‘A Line Above The Sky’ combines memoir, her feelings about motherhood and a philosophical consideration of what compels people to climb.

I have read plenty of books this year that I’ve liked, but not all of them have stuck around in my head for very long. The ones I’ve selected here, however, became touchstones of a kind in a world where it’s very, very easy to bounce around ceaselessly in an input overload.

Helen Mort’s memoir A Line Above the Sky is a deft exploration by a poet and climber of what it was like to become a mother for the first time. Mort retained her desire to escape “into silence and height”. “I need edges and stone,” she writes, “something I can stand on the brink of”. She teases out how these urges could be reconciled with her new life devoted to caring for and nurturing a helpless infant, while also revisiting awkward teenage years spent as an only child in ex-industrial Derbyshire, when climbing began to form both a release and an obsession.