Cham
By Jonathan Trigell
Serpent’s Tail £10.99
FT bookshop price: £8.79

The study of Shelley and his alpine cavorts brought Itchy to Chamonix. Ten years on, and still craving the adrenaline rush of powder snow, he tends a bar there, “riding the hill” as often as possible.

Now, though, an uncaught rapist is stalking “Cham’s” seedier quarter – in a menacing echo of the valley’s most famous fugitive: Mary Shelley’s monster.

Itchy, too, is on the run from crushed adolescent love and juvenile misdeeds that even heroic drinking can’t blank out. Sublime skiing, Itchy’s self-loathing and the marauding rapist all keep energy and suspense levels high.

Fuelled by booze, Trigell’s ski-bum hedonism does for extreme winter sports what Alex Garland’s The Beach did for backpacking – snippets from the Romantic poets standing in for Garland’s Thai fantasia.