The day that Walter Welzenbach climbs his first mountain marks the rest of his life: he never wants to do anything else. Now he is at his final peak, a dizzying 8188 meters high, looking down at his loneliness.

Oxygen Debt is a breathtaking novel about two friends, Lenny and Walter, who chase their dreams in the Alps and Himalayans – sealing their fate in doing so. They carry with them the stories of the great alpinists that have done the tours before them, and together they search for a way to write a new chapter of mountaineering history. But in the thin air, different rules apply.

Ten years after publishing his renowned bestseller At Sea, Toine Heijmans again takes the reader to an unrelenting world with a novel about freedom and friendship, storms and avalanches, and the consequences of radical choices. What mountains do to people, and what people do to mountains, that’s what this is all about.