An Outside Conversation with ‘In the Shadow of the Mountain’ Author Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

This week, Outside Book Club host Elizabeth Hightower Allen spoke with author Silvia Vasquez-Lavado about her memoir In the Shadow of the Mountain, the Book Club’s May pick. On the one hand, the books is about Vasquez-Lavado journey to become the first Peruvian woman to summit Everest (and the first queer woman to climb the Seven Summits), but as Allen wrote in her review for Outside, “it’s a lot more—a story about surviving abuse, moving through addiction, and coming to terms with the shadows in all of our lives.”