When Amy McCulloch’s marriage broke down five years ago, she found herself at a “total loss” as to the direction her life was headed.
The day her husband left, she decided to book herself a solo trip to walk the longest waymarked trail in Ireland – the 200km Kerry Way.
At this point she would never have described herself as athletic – perhaps someone who went for the odd jog.
But that adventure in Ireland gave her a taste for trekking and hiking.
Flash forward five years and Amy, who is Chinese-Canadian but lives in Crystal Palace in London, holds the record for the youngest Canadian woman to climb to the top of 8,163 metres high Mount Manaslu in Nepal.
She climbed the world’s eighth-highest peak as part of a group led by world-renowned climber Nims Purja – star of the hit Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible.
In March/April she is going to run the Marathon Des Sables – a six-day 251km ultra marathon in the Sahara desert.
Amy has climbed a lot in Scotland, namely Ben Nevis, the Cuillins on Skye and the Cairngorms.
Significantly, however, when Amy was at the top of Mount Manaslu in the so-called ‘Death Zone’, as well as being focused on climbing, she also realised it would be the ideal setting for a novel.
She had written previously including co-writing several successful books for teenagers.
Now Amy has released her debut adult crime novel – Breathless – which is a murder-thriller set on a mountain.
Crucially, it’s the setting of the book that’s the real star with the tense and claustrophobic atmosphere inspired by Amy’s real life experiences.
Matter of life and death
In an interview with The Courier from London, the 35-year-old explains that tragedy, and near tragedy, she experienced on the mountain made her realise what a life and death situation being there was.
It also made her realise it would be the perfect environment to commit, and cover up, a homicide.
“I had a really rapid rise in mountaineering,” says Amy, who recently married a climber friend in Scotland.
“I summited my first mountain on New Year’s Day 2018 and only 18 months later I was on the top of an 8000 metre peak.
“That was really very quick when it comes to my mountaineering adventures.
“I always knew when I was out there in nature that I was going to write a book about it.
“But because my previous background was sci-fi, I thought ‘is there a fantasy element to it here or a big science fiction novel’?
“It wasn’t until I joined this expedition to climb Manaslu that I realised really how much of a knife edge I was walking every day that I was on the mountain.”
Amy says that even though she had such a good team around her, she was aware every day that if anything went wrong – if the weather changed, if there was a crevasse fall – it could result in her death.
But she realised this harsh environment could also be the perfect setting for a thriller.
“You are surrounded by people on the mountain that you don’t know and each one of us has a back story,” she says. “Each one of us has a reason for being there.
“I just thought if anyone had nefarious intentions, there’s no police investigation on the mountain – accidents are just written off as that.
“They are not investigated any further, and it’s very difficult to understand what’s going on up there because it’s so dangerous for rescuers.”
Overwhelming experience
Amy laughs that one of the first things she did, just 100m after coming off the Manaslu summit, was to sit down with a notepad to capture how overwhelmed she felt.
On the way up the mountain she had seen a man abseiling downwards as they waited to climb up. Instead of stopping, he kept going and ended up falling half-way down a crevasse.
“Thankfully we were able to rescue him from what could have been a really terrible event,” she adds.
“I was really confronted with the fact that at any moment something could really go terribly wrong. It was such a thin line.”
When she got back to base camp, however, hearing about the death of another climber brought home the dangers they’d faced.
A London-based Polish woman on another team, who was an experienced climber, suffered from hypoxia high up in the Death Zone. Amy had spoken to her many times on the mountain.
However, it wasn’t until Amy’s team had made it down to base camp that they heard she’d passed away.
“It was the kind of thing where, when someone is suffering from altitude sickness, the only cure is for them to turn around and go down,” says Amy.
“We had understood that she had been able to descend and was starting to feel a lot better – starting to act a lot more normally, starting to be able to handle herself.
“But the whole team was exhausted from this rescue operation and they went to sleep at one of the middle camps – camp three.
“When they woke up the next morning she had gone out to the bathroom and never came back in. She had frozen to death, just like that.
“There was no avalanche danger, no terrible weather. It was just her own body had broken down.”
Change of direction
Before becoming a full-time writer, Amy was editorial director for Penguin Random House Children’s Books.
In 2013, she was named one of The Bookseller‘s Rising Stars of publishing.
Reflecting on the break-down of her marriage after a year, which came after being in a long-term relationship, Amy recalls how she presumed that after getting married, she’d settle down and start a family.
As she came to terms with her change in circumstance, however, she realised she had a choice.
She could stay where she was completely alone in her house “wallowing”, or, she could try to do something that was good for her body and soul while trying to come to terms with the “experience and grief of losing her marriage”.
After returning from that inspirational walking trip to Ireland, she immediately booked a solo walking trip around the Annapurna circuit in Nepal.
It was during that trek that she set eyes on Manaslu for the first time.
“I was just so kind of blown away by the magnificence and the beauty of what was out there in the world, and also blown away by what my body was able to achieve,” she says.
Then, her now husband Chris – the first person she’d started to date since the end of her marriage – invited her to climb Toubkal, the highest mountain in Morocco.
“We ended up summiting that at sunrise on New Year’s Day,” she smiles. “I just got summit fever.
“I just had this incredible experience and moment of peace and wonder at the world, and also at what I’d been able to achieve.
“I just wanted to see how far I could take it. So I just kept pushing it a little bit higher each time.”
Expedition life
It was while summiting Aconcagua – the highest mountain in the Americas – that she really enjoyed the experience of expedition life.
It was during that trip that she met Nims Purja. Impressed by her strong climbing skills, he invited her on the Manaslu trip.
“You don’t know how you are going to handle expedition life,” says Amy, who has always been a lover of adventure history, including Shackleton and Edmund Hilary.
“It’s one of the things I wanted to explore in the book. The climb is one thing. But the summit push is just one day out of a three week, month long expedition.
“You are living on the mountain, you are sleeping on the glacier, there’s no privacy, there’s no running water, you are with a group of people you don’t necessarily know.
“All of those challenges are almost more difficult than actually reaching the summit itself because you are so worn down – you are living at a base camp which is 5000m high. “You are existing on less than half the oxygen available to you at sea level, and that’s just at base camp.
“All of that puts a lot of stress and pressure on your body and not everybody enjoys that aspect of it.”
Overcoming fears
Amy’s parents were both “shocked and appalled” by her interest in mountaineering.
Her father told her the day she summited Manaslu was the “worst day of his life.”
He was genuinely worried for her.
However, the book has helped her deal with some of the issues she was dealing with at the time.
The main character, Cecily Wong, deals with imposter syndrome and feelings of inadequacy – things Amy has faced, and overcome, throughout her own career and mountaineering journey.
*Breathless by Amy McCulloch, published by Penguin, is out now, £12.99
