© Joao Garcia and Aurélio Faria
1st Edition:
Lua de Papel, October 2025, 192 pages
Killer. Savage. Imposing. These are the adjectives that describe the second highest mountain on the planet and the peak that Pakistanis know as Chogori, the Mountain of Mountains.
In the summer of 2007, João Garcia began his climb. He carried in his memory the tragedy that had occurred just a year earlier in Tibet, when he lost one of his expedition companions. Now he was back, with an added fear: the conditions were far from ideal, and the mountain that awaited him was considered the deadliest on the planet. The statistics were not kind: only 30 percent of climbers succeeded.
On July 20th, he tackled the final stage, without supplemental oxygen, as he had always done. Down below, at base camp, at 5,000 meters, journalist Aurélio Faria followed the adventure through a telescope.
I had been reporting on it for two months, but the space I had for coverage was limited, and much material was left out. Almost 20 years later, the journalist and the mountaineer, who was then the first Portuguese to reach the summit, reunited to recover memories. They compared writings and recovered everything that had been forgotten.
Thus was born K2 – The Queen of the Mountains, the testament to this epic expedition, which marked them both, and where João Garcia once again justified the nickname his Nepalese friends gave him in 1999: Tshinring dai – “he who lives a long time” in Sherpa.
Where to buy (only in portuguese): Leya online