“I’ve read this novel, a story about two best friends who are also climbing partners, twice so far. The first time I became lost in the complexity of the relationships, the heartbreak, the full love,and the bid for repair. The second time I read it for the technical precision, the tension of incomplete ambitions, and the unbearably elegant structure. This novel is a classic. It will be read and loved again and again.”

—Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal and The Bear

 “You know there are people whose obsession is big-wall climbing. You may have seen the documentaries, read the articles, perhaps even read a memoir. But you’ve never read anything that takes you so deep inside the anchoritic psyche of helpless, abject cliff worship. The narrator is ambivalent and supremely observant, his partner the absolutist. See Ishmael and Ahab, Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty. This is literary fiction of a high order, with a physical immediacy and specificity that never let up, and then a riveting next-generation denouement. The final top-out will destroy you. Climb on.”
—William Finnegan, The New Yorker; author of Barbarian Days

“As a lifelong climber, climbing writer, and student of mountaineering literature, I want the world to know: Jonathan Howland’s Native Air is the novel that we American climbers and readers of serious fiction have been waiting for. This book is the first true literary deep dive into the austere beauty, deep friendships, and high emotional cost of the lives we’ve all led in America’s great empty spaces, tilting at mysterious windmills, chasing truths and dreams we can never quite name. Howland is the real deal—as a climber, a writer, and a deep thinker about the human condition. Native Air belongs on the bookshelf of not just every climber but anyone whose heart registers the beauty and danger of exposure.”
—Daniel Duane, author of Lighting Out, A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West, and A Mouth Like Yours

“Jonathan Howland’s characters are so real to those of us who live on the edge of big mountains and wild spaces that it reads more like a memoir by one of my Alaskan former 'dirtbag climber' neighbors than a novel. You may read Native Air for the climbing details and its big authentic western heart, but it’s the love stories that made me wish it didn’t end. This is a novel full of people I know— and care about."

—Heather Lende, Alaska State Writer Laureate, author of Find the Good, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, and most recently Of Bears and Ballots

“In Native Air I was drawn in by the human story—rich, tragic, compelling—and the vivid portrayal of the climbing itself. Both elements felt real and raw and true. For me, it all works.”
—Michael Kennedy, climber, photographer, writer, and past editor of Climbing and Alpinist

“Native Air is anchored in universals—the tension between pure experience and meaning-making; the relationships that resist easy classification; the project of carrying on in the ‘rubbishy aftermath’ of events from which meaning can’t be made in any satisfying or final way, to name a few. The unusual access to both freedom and total catastrophe afforded by climbing puts the regular business of being human into sharp—and, in this book, gorgeous—relief.”

—Sarah Carvill, Environmental Studies Faculty, Portland State University

“If you are a climber, this book will make your pulse quicken and your hands sweat. If you aren't a climber, you’ll learn what it means to be one. Readers of any background will inevitably gravitateto the human drama central to this suspenseful story. Honest, compelling, and expertly rendered, Native Air will stick with you long after you turn the final page.

—Chris Kalman, author of As Above, So Below and Damned If You Don’t