The Reading #10: The Shining Mountains with Alix Christie 11.12.23 in Berlin, Lettrétage

Book Launch with Alix Christie, Donovan Dennis and Joachim Zepelin

The Reader Berlin presents the Berlin book launch of THE SHINING MOUNTAINS with author Alix Christie in conversation with writer, publisher and journalist Joachim Zepelin. The evening will be accompanied by short fiction from Donovan Dennis.

“The more we know of the past, the more we know of ourselves,” the Scottish fur trader Angus McDonald wrote in his ledger in Montana in the 1870s. Alix Christie’s novel THE SHINING MOUNTAINS follows a family saga set against the backdrop of America’s Rocky Mountain West. The year is 1838. The young Scotsman Angus McDonald flees his homeland to trade for fur in the unclaimed Oregon Country. There he discovers a world beyond even a Highlander's wildest imaginings: raging rivers, buffalo hunts, and the powerful daughter of an ancient and magnificent people. In Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nez Perce chiefs, Angus recognizes a kindred spirit. The world in which they fall in love will soon be torn apart by competing claims: between British fur traders, American settlers, and the Native peoples who have lived for millennia in the valleys and plateaus of the Shining Mountains.

The true story of this union of the fur trade and indigenous worlds is based on Christie’s own family. Alix Christie, a direct descendant of Angus McDonald’s brother Duncan, met with her distant cousins and consulted extensively with the Nez Perce and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to write the story of her blended family.