His entry begins:For the past several years, my reading has been confined almost exclusively to non-fiction books about mountain climbing. Actually, I’ve been an arm-chair mountaineer for many years, beginning, as many others did, with Herzog’s classic Annapurna when I was a teenager. When I decided a few years ago that my second novel would be about three women mountain climbers racing to be the first female to summit all fourteen of the 8,000 meter mountains, my research began again in earnest. My library contains perhaps fifty or sixty climbing books, and my Kindle another dozen.About Redemption Mountain, from the publisher:
Most recently, I reread two of the books most pertinent to my story, which are in fact mentioned prominently in my book. The Last Step: The American Ascent of K2 by Rick Ridgeway, is a classic mountaineering book about the first American expedition to reach the summit of K2, in 1978. If you feel the urge...[read on]
In this emotional debut, a NY executive, restless in his success, is sent to W. Virginia and meets a small-town woman and her son who open his eyes to a richer life than he could have imagined.Visit Gerry FitzGerald's website.
On the surface, Charlie Burden and Natty Oaks could not be more different: She, the daughter of many generations of rural farmers; he, an executive at a multi-national engineering firm. But, in each other, they find the new lease on life they both so desperately need.
Natty dreams of a life beyond her small town. She is unhappily married to her high school crush (who now spends more time at the bar than at home) and passes the time nursingretired miners, coaching her son, The Pie Man's, soccer team and running the mountain trails she knows by heart, longing to get away from it all. Charlie has everything he ever thought he wanted, but after 25 years of climbing the corporate ladder, he no longer recognizes his own life: his job has become bureaucratic paper-pushing, his wife is obsessed with their country-club status, and his children have grown up and moved on. When he is sent to West Virginia to oversee a mining project, it is a chance to escape his stuffy life; to get involved, instead of watching from the sidelines. Arriving in Red Bone, though, he gets more than he bargained for: his new friends become the family he was missing and Natty, the woman who reminds him what happiness feels like. When his company's plans threaten to destroy Natty's family land, his loyalties are questioned and he is forced to choose between his old life and his new love in a fight for Redemption Mountain.
Writers Read: Gerry FitzGerald.
--Marshal Zeringue
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