A simple yet profound story. Andreas Egger – a man of few words, with a limp, spending years alone in the middle of an Alpine valley. He left only twice. For the Russian front and then – when he got on a bus. The world changes, people come and go, cable cars are built, his love Marie and his whole cabin vanish under an avalanche. And he – still stays. His whole life long.

"I thought it would be easier to stop loving someone," Olmo tells his grandfather. "It isn't hard, you know. I just forgot to teach you." A gentle story with something strange unfolding behind it. A cabin in the Aosta Valley, thirteen-year-old Olmo, the grandfather who raised him, and his brother Diego, who may not be entirely all right. But why, damn it?

One of those Kerouac books where you don't get completely lost in the torrent of words and his frenzied mind. The climb up California's Matterhorn hurts him. He sobs and moans, but Kerouac also discovers something. The purity of nature and the magic of Buddhism. And then he heads off to a hut on remote Desolation Peak to watch over the mountains for fires. Months of solitude await him.

Aleš Palán knows how to do interviews. He's done so many of them. He also did a book-length interview with the Chief – Miloslav Nevrlý. Careful, though. As you read, you'll start longing to go back in time. To a time when the forest was truly silent. When not everything could be found on a map yet and you had to earn every rare spot with hours of wandering.

The Chief himself wrote a lot. And in this book, little brother, he'll take you to places where the scent of wild thyme tickles your nose, where sparkling water scooped from a mountain stream chills your palate – and don't even get us started on the potato baked in the embers by an old shepherd. And if you want to carry on with the Chief, try savouring The Faded Taste of Cloudberries (Zašlá chuť morušek).

It starts in the mountains and ends with a divine task. A man in his late fifties guides illegal refugees across the mountains. But once he's got them across, he gives them their money back. He doesn't talk about it, he just does it. When journalists start taking an interest, though, he has to leave the village. For a city where, as a craftsman, he's given a commission: to carve a penis out of marble and give the crucified Christ back his nakedness.

Pretty much everyone knows The Eight Mountains by now. That book made him a writer. But Paolo Cognetti is not a one-book man. Take The Wolf's Happiness – unsuccessful writer Fausto leaves Milan for the mountains. To find something there. And he soon discovers he's not the only one the mountains whisper to. It's beautiful, but life up there isn't easy. And staying is even harder.

It starts like a Jack London novel. An animal roams the landscape. Wild and full of rage. Then people appear. A forest ranger investigating who's been killing dogs along the polluted Sesia river, and his brother, back from Canada to settle their father's inheritance. And both flee to the mountains, where their father planted two trees. Completely different – just like the two brothers.

Of fourteen houses, only one is still standing. In the Sudetenland, places like this are called vanished villages. Morgenland is one of them. And this is the story of the last person who stayed, and of those who had to leave. They had to abandon their home in the mountains – their Altvater. History has two sides. Maybe in this book you'll find the key to both. It's sad and sweet at the same time.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Two years of solitude on the shore of Walden Pond. Thoreau was a philosopher, and so is this book.

Thoreau went out into nature every day. To notice even the tiniest changes, because nature never stands still. He wrote everything down – and we get to leaf through his notes. Instead of a dose of Instagram, one entry from Thoreau. It's not a book you'll spend a whole evening with. But it's nice to have it lying on the table – and open it now and then.

Tramp. Sailor. Gold prospector. Oyster pirate. Jack London was an adventurer, and his books are just like that – full of raw adventure. Buck, a pampered city dog, soon learns the law of club and fang in the far north – and learns to survive in the wild. What next? An Odyssey of the North – sixteen stories, the hard life of tough men, no frills.

There are many ways to write about athletes. But nobody in Czechia (and maybe in the world) did it better than Ota Pavel. Climbing the Eiger is the short story that gave the whole book its title. So once the drama on the Eiger North Face is over, it's the turn of Raška or Zátopek. And if that's not enough, reach for the collection Stories from the Drawer (Povídky z šuplíku). There you'll find out what mountain photographer Vilém Heckel was like.

Bajo's climbing yarns – ah! They simply can't be missing here. You can read them over and over again – once at home in an armchair, then on a bunk in a mountain hut and a third time at a bivouac by a crackling fire. And you'll still be grinning at these stories as if reading them for the first time. Simply a lovely, cheerful work – and a cult book for every Czechoslovak climber.

It's usually the case that the book is better than the film. In this case, though, it's up for long debate. The book may not be better than the Brad Pitt film – it's simply different. It's a travel diary – and all the more interesting because nobody will ever again see the Tibet that Heinrich Harrer experienced before the Chinese invasion. If any of us ever gets to see it at all.

Who has never dreamed of spending part of their life among Native Americans on the plains of the Wild West? Making fire with friction sticks, sewing moccasins, building a tipi or damming a stream? With this book, boys start to discover everything you can get up to out there. And dads go back to their childhood. Two Little Savages, Yan and Sam – a legend since 1903.