Above All: A Memoir of Mountains and the Women Who Climbed Them

Coming soon.

She started climbing at 50. At 62 she became the oldest woman ever to summit K2.

In 2009, at the age of fifty, Liliya Ianovskaia had never climbed a mountain. She had grown up in Soviet Belarus, studied mathematics in Minsk, raised children and built a life in Canada. Mountaineering was not part of her world. Then her daughter Dasha challenged her to try.

Within three years they stood together on the summit of Kilimanjaro. Aconcagua, Rainier and the Matterhorn followed. On May 14, 2022, mother and daughter reached the summit of Everest together, only the third mother–daughter team ever to do so. Two months later, at 62 years and 350 days, Ianovskaia summited K2 and became the oldest woman in history to reach the world’s second-highest mountain, a record certified by Guinness World Records. Then came Gasherbrum II, Lhotse, Dhaulagiri, Makalu and Annapurna I.

But Above All is not only a mountaineering memoir. Ianovskaia also traces the largely unknown history of Belarusian women in high-altitude climbing, women whose achievements were recorded incompletely or not at all, and who shaped her imagination long before she set foot on a glacier.

It is a book about late beginnings, endurance across continents, and the women who carried their flags, and their histories, into the high mountains.

• Author: Liliya Ianovskaia
• Formats: Paperback; EPUB
• ISBN (paperback): 978-1-0697424-2-1
• ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-0658448-1-5
• Publisher: Grunwald Publishing, Canada