The Rose of Tibet

Thrilling ... a perilous journey across Tibet in search of a missing brother.

This tale of a quest for treasure from India to Tibet should ... have been a Harrison Ford film.

Like all accounts of wild and dangerous encounters with extreme cold, pain and fear, it intensifies the comfort and cosiness of an armchair in a warm, softly-lit room in a peaceful and ordered land ... An astonishing work of imagination.

Is Lionel Davidson today's Rider Haggard? His novel has all the excitement of She and King Solomon's Mines.

A first-class piece of storytelling, well-plotted, convincing, suspenseful.

[W]ritten with elegance, intelligence and wit ... The Rose of Tibet, if it is to be classified, is an adventure thriller, peppered with history, religion and politics. Its hero, Charles Houston, a failed artist bored with being an art teacher, sets out to find his brother Hugh, last heard of travelling with a film crew in Tibet. It is late 1949, shortly before communist China's invasion of the Buddhist state ... Most of the book's riveting atmospheric action is filled by Houston's slow and troubled journey over the mountains to Yamdring, a town teeming with priestesses and monasteries, at one of which his brother was rumoured to be. He's constantly beset by illness, a propensity to drink, injury, exhaustion, terrible weather, inadequate maps, an unreliable horse and the young Ringling, an inexperienced local guide and translator ... His flight back to civilisation is as fraught as was his journey to Yamdring - and just as gripping ... Faber's reissue of Lionel Davidson's novels, which started last year with Kolymsky Heights, is very welcome.